


Nuclear Decay

by mxmaelstrom



Category: Dope (US Band), Dope Stars Inc. (Band), Genitorturers (Band), KMFDM (Band), Murderdolls (Band), Slipknot (Band), Static X (Band), The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: Accidental Baby Acquisition, Angst, Dystopia, Friendship, Gen, Religious Cults, Resistance Movements, Separation, all the pov characters will meet at some point, and atm none of the characters appear im just using the universe, and i’m tagging mentioned people too cuz my current plan is for them to actually feature, and the game characters might be mentioned or appear later on but not for the foreseeable future, dyad from orphan black appear but not enough to warrant the tag, more pov characters as i go, more will be tagged as i go, same with bli from mcr danger days, the events of the games might be touched upon depending if they’re relevant, this is set like thirty years after the second game
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:28:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27824527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mxmaelstrom/pseuds/mxmaelstrom
Summary: It’s my favourite bands set in the Last Of Us Universe about thirty years after the end of the second game.———————————‘They were the lucky ones. That’s what he’d always been told. They were the children of those who survived the fungal infections and made it to ‘safety’, before the military stopped accepting people and started kicking people out of the quarantine zones for little reason other than someone had to go, before the infection hotspots got the living daylights bombed out of them by Amity three decades later, survivors be damned.’
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve got writers block with AWiL so I’ve been writing this whilst watching playthroughs of tlou. It is literally just some of my fav bands in the tlou universe with dyad from orphan black and bli from danger days making an appearance. Orphan Black and Danger Days won’t be tagged until they actually appear, and updates will be as sporadic as usual. More POVs will be introduced if and when they need to appear so I’m starting with the vocalists of the bands and then adding as i go. As per usual lmk either in the comments or on tumblr if i miss any tags, and I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I am writing it!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i s2g my ability to pick up on typos is only functioning after i hit post cuz this was in my docs for three months and i’m still finding typos :):):):):):)

Once, New York State had apparently been a lovely, green place away from the city, full of farms and pretty towns. It had been lovely, a little type of heaven, especially in the little suburb his family had grown up in, with white picket fences and green lawns and twee porches, the little border flower-beds and the curtains peeking behind windows picturesque breaks in the sleepy monotony of the road. Children had played outside on the streets, with bicycles and scooters and soccer balls, and their parents had let them, unbothered by fears of tragedy occurring.

At least, that was what Edsel recalled his mother recalling from her early childhood, backed up by tales from her parents, though he’d been so young when they’d died that he couldn’t recall their faces, and his mother’s voice was a fading memory. He didn’t know the truth of it, and likely never would. That world didn’t exist anymore, hadn’t done for decades.

No amount of wistful storytelling could bring it back, either. Not after the cordyceps had ravaged the world and created monsters, not after the military took control and tried to rule without trying for a cure, and certainly not after Amity had snatched control after FEDRA’s collapse and bombed half the country. The peaceful world his mother had reminisced about was no more, and he had to move on.

They were the lucky ones. That’s what he’d always been told. They were the children of those who survived the fungal infections and made it to ‘safety’, before the military stopped accepting people and started kicking people out of the quarantine zones for little reason other than someone had to go, before the infection hotspots got the living daylights bombed out of them by Amity three decades later, survivors be damned. Before Amity’s bombs had plunged the country into a winter for four freezing years, damaging the world enough that the winters could last nearly half the year before switching into scorching summer.

They were immeasurably lucky.

Sliding his stupidly lanky frame to the door of their hideout - there was never enough food, even with him and his lot growing most of their own stuff - he wanted to snarl, angry. Oh, how fucking lucky he was. He lived on the run, breaking into the fortified White Plains Quarantine Zone through the sewers, living in a disused branch of said sewers, hoping that he didn’t die from cold, fungal spores, or those who had succumbed to either of the above options. He ate often vile food badly cooked over a fire, they were always cold unless they were cooking, and he was saddled with leading a gang of ex-quarantine zone kids, trying to keep them all alive whilst trying not to die himself, living outside the law and mostly dependent on the goodwill of the black market thugs; a life he’d hoped to leave behind after he left Brooklyn but kept returning to because it was all he knew. The suppliers outside the city were few and far between, and often drove a bargain too hard for them to usually be able to trade with. The only decent one near them was so paranoid he’d only ever speak to Virus.

Mostly it felt like he could never do enough.

“Take it out on the Infected.” Virus sat next to him, lighting up a cigarette.

“What?” He looked up, not knowing when he’d put his head in his hands out of frustrated rage, and repressed the urge to snatch the cigarette to take a drag.

“It’s not your fault the world is like this. Being angry over shit you’ll never change is a waste of time. Save your rage for the Infected when they come after you. Or Amity. Those bastards deserve it.”

“I’m angry cuz I’m barely keeping us alive,” he snapped back, then tilted his head to lean it on Virus’s shoulder in a silent apology for snapping. “I’m angry cuz I’m doing all I can, and it’s never enough. And I’m angry because we might not be here much longer if Amity’s soldiers keep coming down here.”

Virus slipped his arm around him, his thumb rubbing his arm like a comforting parent.

Edsel pushed that thought away as soon as it entered his brain, but relaxed into the other man’s embrace all the same.

“Who said you have to be the one in control? We all joined you and Simon, but we all agreed this ain’t a dictatorship. You’re not responsible for us. Keep pretending to be and you’ll be crushed by the weight of it all. And as long as you shut doors properly, it won’t be your fault if we have to leave.” Virus clapped his arm, pressing his cheek into Edsel’s dreads. The motion made him absurdly want to cry. “C’mon. You got supplies to trade. Choose the enemy and cut him down, and stop wasting your energy focusing on what-ifs. We all do what we can, and we all take it day by day. You know we’re all prepared to up and leave if it becomes too dangerous to be here, and you know deep down we’re not gonna abandon you.”

“You do your job and I’ll do mine.” Edsel sniffed, rolling his eyes. Virus nodded.

“We’ve all got shit to do, burdens to bear. You listen to our shit, so we’d reciprocate if you’d let us.”

Edsel scoffed and leaned away from Virus. He’d rather choke on his own puke than talk about his feelings.

Virus was unimpressed, but let it go, only quirking one side of his mouth. “One final thing, before you go?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t go through the West tunnels again. There’s no point torturing yourself, especially over other people’s failures.” 

Edsel huffed and grunted at him childishly, double checked he had everything he needed, and headed off before Virus’s pep talk became a lecture.

The heavy door locked behind him with a quiet ‘klunk’, Virus’s knowing look boring a hole between his shoulders.

It would be so easy to disregard Virus’s warning and to take the self-flagellating route.

But time was of the essence, and he’d rather not have to wear his gas mask, so he looked longingly at its entrance for a few seconds and carried on.

The particular sewage system Edsel and his little group lived in was a six square mile maze of tangled pipes, maintenance rooms, and the occasional tunnel of stagnant water underneath the outskirts of Westchester, near White Plains. It was cold and smelly, and the winters were so harsh snow could blow twenty feet into the tunnels they couldn’t enclose, the spring meltwater always finding a way into their little section in the north and bringing in the threat of unending death every year without fail, no matter how they tried to divert the water elsewhere.

It also used to ruin their radio wires, so they’d had to trade the parts to repair the wires and keep the radio dish on the roof of the cabin instead of by the entrance.

That was probably all their fault for living so close to the entrance, though.

To be fair, the West tunnels were just uninhabitable, the South tunnels were too close to the quarantine zone to not run the risk of Infected or soldiers, and the East had been full of live Infected and were currently full of spores and dead Infected. The North was the only place to really live, and meltwater-exempt, they’d chosen pretty well where to set up as close to a home as they could. The maintenance hatch to the surface in their camp was the only one with both a metal trapdoor and a glass bubble hatch, so they could check for Infected before tending the few crops they grew in a fortified field, and the goats and chicken in the next field. They had a decent setup, and plans to stock up on sandbags for the meltwater. They ran almost exclusively on solar power, and their camp was heavily fortified; every exit always locked except for when it was needed, with stocked saferooms all along their routes out of the sewers if the need arose. They’d trapped the surrounding half mile of their camp and the main path to the surface as an alert for unwelcome visitors, and they had so many backup plans to escape if they needed to that their home was as safe as it could be.

Truth be told, the traps - sound-traps - were mostly unnecessary past the first hundred metres or so from their camp. Past that distance they couldn’t be heard, but that had simply made the group change them from doors booby-trapped with crates of old bottles to patches of broken glass or debris arranged in specific patterns to look random. Any outsiders would step on the glass, smashing it at best, but always shifting it out of place enough to see next time someone went on a supply run that company was a possibility.

Before he’d left to chase rumours down south, Acey had originally wanted to tripwire the tunnels with bombs, but after mulling over it, they had all decided that that made it obvious someone was living down there. They needed the traps to know when they weren’t alone, but they also couldn’t afford to be obvious about it.

None of the glass and debris had been disturbed, not even right by the surface, at the entrance where Amity’s goons got sent down the tunnels on an irritatingly regular basis. Good.

The next task was getting out without being seen. The manholes might be the easiest to physically get out of, but Amity patrolled the streets, so the disused sewers chutes of abandoned buildings were better, though smellier.

And those buildings were never completely abandoned.

The Infected might be superhumanly fast and strong, but the living were the most vicious. He couldn’t afford to be robbed and left for dead by a gang of the cutthroat underworld of the quarantine zone, and however cruel the black markets were, the gangs of dispossessed and discarded were worse. Living on the fringes and being left unable to have much of a community to fall back on made people bitter and single-minded, and Edsel knew all too well what that could look like if you wound up on the wrong side. He’d seen it enough times.

Last winter, heavy rain had immediately succeeded the worst snows in living memory, and one of the dilapidated and already disused community centres had lost its roof. The building briefly became a haven for those trying to escape Amity’s quarantine zones, as the sewers there were not just linked to the outskirt sewers, but also to the lines running all under the whole of the city, and now the building was officially abandoned it was perfect for escapees. Amity had tried to crack down on the literal pipeline, but it had been mostly too late by then, and the ensuing three months was spent trying to evade the soldiers that hunted for anyone within city limits outside of the QZs. 

They couldn’t even fucking kill the soldiers, because the corpses would attract Infected and spore up the tunnels, they couldn’t burn the bodies in an enclosed space very well, and dragging corpses took too long. They’d nearly lost their saferooms, too, so all in all, it could have been a complete disaster.

Amity hadn’t done much to actually deal with the sewers, weirdly. They seemed so arrogantly sure of themselves, even now, that they simply upped the patrols for that entire block and increased the punishment if caught and the promise of rewards for ratting out potential escapees, but they didn’t send many more patrols actually down into the sewers. 

Luckily, the community centre shared a basement with an old tenement building, and it was pretty easy to get to the tenement’s maintenance tunnels, to then walk out of the front door with a falsified ID card if anyone stopped him. Then he just had to sneak down back alleys and through abandoned buildings to get to the docks and trade surplus crops and information from the East Coast Network radio for ammo and actually semi decent bread and other food they couldn’t gather on their own.

It was as easy as it could be. Infected had gotten into another building down the road, and Amity were too busy dealing with it to card him, or even really look twice at him. He got all of six blocks away before asking what had happened, pretending he hadn’t come that way, shouldering his bag like any other tired, hungry QZ resident.

“Isn’t there usually a patrol now?” He’d stopped to join a small queue to buy some scrap canvas and denim and thread to fortify his clothes. Anything that could stop Infected teeth was a need for his whole gang, and armour was near impossible to get hold of, even on the black market. They did the best with what they could.

The woman behind him was only too keen to share the gossip. “Didn’t you hear? Where the community centre lost its roof? Down there somewhere Infected broke into the sewer line last night again. That’s three times this month now! They came from down south, I heard, from Queens or Brooklyn. The area between the QZs must be full of spores from dead Infected. I bet the Infected from last night were a bunch of kids who’d tried to get outta here.” She widened her eyes, and hastily added, “That’s why people shouldn’t leave. It’s safe here. It’s not out there. I dunno what they were thinking.”

Edsel shrugged and tugged on one of his dreads, scrunching his face up because he didn’t exactly live in the quarantine zone. “Grass is greener on the other side, probably.”

After she hmmed in response, seemingly relieved at his response, he turned to mull over her words.

If Infected were in the area surrounding the sewers more frequently, that meant trouble. If any got into the sewers, they couldn’t stay there. Killing them wasn’t too hard, unless they were Stalkers, but their bodies would spore up the whole damn area, and his gang might have to leave if it got spored up.

But, his sewers might be linked to the city ones, but he could fortify the entrance to make it hard for the Infected to get in without Amity noticing something was up. The Infected might be stronger than a person, but they were also pretty stupid.

But he could only block off his tunnels on his way back in. Every second he was in the QZ was a second in which Infected could get into his home, so he had to be quick.

Even worse, he didn’t trust Amity not to send an infected person not yet turned down into his sewers, so they could die down there and make it dangerous for he and his to get about.

And then there was the curfew.

Yeah, he really didn’t have time to waste.

Luckily the queue went down pretty quickly, and he was soon on his way to the docks.

That involved sneaking into a tenement block, walking up to Wanye’s apartment, and knocking to be let in. Once in, one of Wayne’s accomplices, Kenny, helped him move a dresser covering a hole in the wall, which led to a tunnel that led him down a few city blocks, out to the abandoned yard of an abandoned block, into another abandoned building; now spore-infested - who the fuck managed to die there anyway? - to another tunnel to another abandoned building on the QZ limits, and out to the back fire escape. There he entered yet another abandoned building, this one longer abandoned, never really part of the QZ, and once through the first floor, he knocked on a door, and Wayne’s main partner in crime, Tony, let him into the docks - bright sunlight that made him blink and the stench of BO and food and the sounds of people bartering and trading and working - and led him to his office, where the supplies were waiting.

Wayne and Tony and the rest of their gang ran the White Plains black market. Despite often taking a more peripheral role, Wayne was the true leader, communicating with his gang through walkie talkies whilst he usually watched the borders of the market or the routes to reach it, keeping an eye out for Amity or Infected. Tony was the muscle of the market, the eyes on the ground, and a stoic second in command. He reminded Edsel rather of Virus, just a great deal more uncompromising.

They walked past stalls selling everything from clothes to ammo to food, the most appealing of the latter being ‘meat’ stew Edsel wasn’t certain didn’t contain rats after the latest food shortage. Rail-thin people had tossed themselves across mattresses covered by the saddest tarp covering in dark, sheltered corners, wrapped in miserable shitty blankets - market workers who needed a quick nap, or others of the QZ underworld who only worked at night. Up a ramp made of pallets and along the veranda to Tony’s office, they passed a boxing ring, the largest in the QZ, and Edsel ignored the sounds of men making bets and yelling threats at the pair within the ring. Boxing was the most palatable form of gambling, but neither he nor any of his had ever taken an interest in it.

Once in the office, Tony nodded at Wayne, sat behind the huge desk and fussing over reports, and reached over the desk to yank a burlap sack out from under it. Edsel unzipped his bag to remove supplies and stack them on the desk.

Nick lounging in a chair, paperwork and tea in front of him, taking notes every so often, because even organised crime involved paperwork. He didn’t look up.

The underworld was made of alliances and grudges, the rise and fall of gangs, and to be on top of it all, near-omniscience was required. Those two gathered all the information about everyone they could and passed it all back to Wayne every night, for him to sift through and decide what to do about it.

“What’s the latest news from the Network?” Because Amity blocked all radio signals that might otherwise enter the QZs, but the affairs of the whole country mattered, even in some shitty QZ staring down the barrel of a gun made of riots and abandonment. Tony moved between Edsel and the sack, crossing his arms and waiting for all the news.

Edsel leaned against the wall, sighed, and crossed his arms right back at the criminal. Wayne looked up from his paperwork to listen. “The Sevenfold reported that Amity nearly lost Oakland the day after last time I came here. There was another earthquake, and a huge forest fire, and Infected swamped the QZ. They lost half the districts, and haven’t yet started regaining the overrun territory. Fuck, they’re still tryna keep the survivors under their thumb, even now. Half the QZ are swallowing the shit of the Final Crusade lot, or the Suns or the Flood, and this new lot called BLI are well on the way to gathering up the remainder. They’ve already taken LA, and given the fuckin’ radiation in the deserts there, no one can get to them. Unless Amity go overhead and bomb the shit out of them. But nobody thinks Amity will keep Oakland for more than three months. With the food shortages they’ve had already, I don't think Amity have the manpower to stop a food riot that’s obviously gonna escalate, and there’s few who’d disagree with me.

“This BLI lot are so fuckin weird, man. No one knows where they really started, even though they first appeared in LA there’s no sign they originated there, only rumours that they’re the remnants of that lot from Outbreak time. No sign of them anywhere else yet, but who knows with their weirdness and secrecy. If they wanted to expand, Santa Barbara would be next on their list, or San Diego, I think.

“The Suns have apparently spread in the last few weeks, infiltrating pretty much everywhere, but mostly the surrounding states’ QZs. Amity are on the verge of losing Reno, and it looks like Vegas will go next. They’ve overtaken some town on the Arizona border, Yuma, I think it was, and blocked off the I-8. Rumour is next they’ll try for the 10 and 40, like they're tryna cut off Phoenix, and maybe leave the whole state crippled for Amity. I mean, shit out there’s mostly desert, so it’s not like they don’t have hiding places, and Arizona was always a problem for Amity, what with the Mexico Route. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the first state to fall, even with Cali the way it is right now. New Mexico is still rife with Raven activity, so that border is a death trap, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were contributing to the chaos.

“The Suns are also targeting Amity in Missouri, Iowa, and Kansas, taking over the farms and bombing the checkpoints and Amity non-QZ HQs, so the QZs out east won’t be eating as much. As if there aren’t enough food shortages! Amity’s gonna be pretty fucked. New York should be fine, cuz it’s fine to grow shit here, and Jersey and Massachusetts, but I don’t fancy the rest of the east coast. I wouldn’t be surprised if they went after Arkansas and Louisiana afterwards. The other QZs are already having food riots, and this’ll cripple Amity’s control even more.

“Meanwhile the Final Crusade are sweeping up even more believers through half the Bible Belt, and whilst out there they’re pretty much exclusive to the countryside, in all the little towns that fortified themselves, they’re dangerous nutters who’d rather let people die than not join them. They haven’t gained _much_ traction out east yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time, cuz they’ve already got to Richmond, and even Annapolis. Even so, their influence out west is a bigger cause for concern, I’d say.

“Florida and Louisiana are getting overrun with Infected, cuz of all the tropical storms. There’s spores everywhere, and people are dumb, so what do you expect? Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. And we all know what Amity thinks of those two. Louisiana’s only good for the Mississippi flood plains, and no one really knows much about what’s going on in Florida anymore anyway. Only the Network there gets anything out, and it’s mostly cries for help, so no one pays attention anyway. But the Crusade are gaining influence there as well, so the south’s gettin’ dangerous.

“The Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia have a competitive religious group calling themselves the Enraptured taking root. Apparently they’ve been underground for months and have only just come into prominence. No one knows what they’ll do, and it’s too early to even see what they’re about, but everyone thinks they’ll be hot shit in a few months. Half the East Coast think they’re a splinter of the Crusade, and out west they think they’re something new entirely.

“Out east there’s not much going on. Way more Infected on the outside than normal, like twice the usual amount at least, so either fortified towns of Infected have lost their fortifications and a wave of Infected are plaguing us, or Amity is up to something. No one knows which, and no one can decide. And there’s Infected getting in to QZs, probably cuz everyone uses the sewers to escape, and they’re dark and damp so perfect for the spores. But no cults, just boring shit. Oh, and there was the Infected this morning. They got into the QZ via the sewers. Not mine, but only down the road from where mine end, in District 3. And I wouldn’t put it past Amity to stop people getting out by infecting the sewers not yet full of spores. They’re bastards, and we all know how underhand they can be.

“Rovers have overtaken Saratoga Springs QZ, but rumour says they won’t hold it long. Just long enough to gain total control and flee south to abandon it. Albany’s in a dangerous position, so I guess someone’s gonna try to overtake it. Prolly the Saratoga lot. Atlantic City has some gang spreading influence down the surviving towns, and their black market’s doing _way_ better than yours, so the mid-east coast network think it's the gang who run that black market, or at least Wednesday does, though the Italian lot in Philly say the gang is Sun-led, not the usual black market. And the German gang, the one that caused shit in Brooklyn and pretty much disappeared, have reappeared in Seattle. Dunno what their game is, cuz the north is getting unsteady enough, and there’s nothing much in Seattle there anyway apart from turf wars. But they’ve been spotted, and no one knows what they’ll do, or what they can do there. 

“Which leads on to my final point. There’s some tech group, not Amity and not a resistance movement exactly. Reports differ on their name, but most people call them Dyad, and they're way too similar to BLI for comfort, but they’re up in Canada, so they won’t be a threat for a while. Apparently they were a biotech company before everything went to shit, and apparently they never stopped, just went underground. No one really knows, not even in Canada, but there’s rumours they’re gonna overtake Plenty, and then make their way south. They’re barely south of the border at the moment, only got a few towns on side, but I bet they’ll spread. Spokane, Michigan, Chicago, and Buffalo would be ideal places for them to start, or Fort Kent, so I can’t see those QZs lasting two years, though if Amity will retake them is another matter. Not Seattle though,” he added like an afterthought. “No point.”

“Be a change of landscape if they do come south.” Wayne hmmed, raising an eyebrow like he was considering them a better option as ruler. Nick and Kenny raised their heads at their leader’s voice, putting their pens down. 

“They’re more old-world than new,” Edsel warned, “and the old world has no place for people like us. I hate to say it, but from what I’ve heard of them, Amity is the best option. Especially for people like us. At least their world is brutal enough for us to live in loopholes. And the shit this Canadian group do-

“Man it’s all rumour, but it’s shit like cloning, breeding soldiers, and implanting shit in test subjects. No one knows if it’s for sleeper cells or biological weaponry or another Ending for them to take over. Even if it’s bullshit, I don’t think I’d ever buddy up with someone who’d let those rumours fly. No one knows shit, or if they do, they’re not saying shit.”

Nick and Kenny went back to their work. Tony grunted. “There’s no immediate inter-state shit, just more Infected. Shit’s all happening out west, so doubtless we’ll know more soon and get a good heads up.” He lifted the sack and reached out, handing it to Edsel. “Looks like we’ve both gotta keep a weather eye on the horizon.”

Edsel took the sack and loaded its contents into his bag. “Yeah. See ya next time.”

Tony grunted his farewell. “Who’s next?”

“Mosey. Same time in three days. I doubt there’ll be new news, though.”

“Hmm. Shit goes slow until it doesn’t, and then it slows again.” Wayne stretched, signalling an end to the conversation. “Well I’ll have a shipment of eggs and flour, and a shitload of ammo, so that’ll be something to look forward to. Nick will let you out.” Nick stood and put his paperwork down. Edsel didn’t bother trying to look at it. He knew there was nothing that pertained to him.

“Cheers.” He followed Nick out of the office. Tony shut the door behind him, Wayne scanning through reports again.

“So shit’s getting disturbed, but not for us yet.” Nick kept his voice low once they were back in the main market. The bloody prize fighters were bathing in the adoration or anger of their supporters, and nobody paid the pair of smugglers any attention.

Edsel grunted and itched his nose. “Same as usual. New York gettin’ left out of the fun whilst the other states get their excitement.” He sounded bitter, but it was fucking monotonous, and he just wanted some excitement.

“We’re safe.” Nick’s voice was wistful. Edsel dropped his hand to his side, guilting pricking him.

Nick had escaped LA with the rest of his gang. They’d been tossed around Cali by Amity until they’d made a break out east, and it had taken two years to get to New York, another three to rise to rule the White Plains underworld. He’d hoped for relative peace, more than the rest of them, but he’d probably wouldn’t know it for much longer.

Nick unlocked the door for Edsel to get back to his hideout, his face a grim, sad mask.

Edsel put his hand on the doorframe and turned to look at the smaller man.

He wanted to offer comfort, but he wasn’t going to lie to him. “It won’t last. I hate Amity, but if they fall it’ll be Cali all over again, for every black market, in every QZ.

And they will fall. New York will probably be the last bastion, we’re the most secure, but when it falls, everyone inside who resisted Dyad will be fucked.”

Nick paled, scowled, and turned to spit on the floor behind him. “What can be done? What can any of us do?” His words were a bitter snark, low and defeated.

“I’ll tell Kenny what I told you lot, and the lot of you can talk it over. If I were you I’d get out whilst the getting out looks good, before shit begins to go south, but you do what you think is right for you lot.”

“You focus on yours I’ll focus on mine? Hmm. It’s always that way. I wish we could focus on everyone, instead of picking and choosing.” Nick gave a mournful sigh. Edsel patted his shoulder and slipped through the door, choosing not to say anything. It locked behind him, and he set off back home without another look.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes the sewer base and the route to the black market are based off the first game. My tumblr is mxmaelstrom so u can send your hate mail there or dm me to listen to me infodump about it. See ya whenever I update.


	2. Chapter 2

Whenever Victor had the opportunity to have a smoke in peace, be it nicotine or weed, he took it with both hands before anyone could stop him. He had spent enough time listening to Grace and Darin complaining about him hotboxing the bunker they lived in - under a radio shack on the outskirts of Philly - that he would only smoke when he was in the open air, though those times were sadly rare, now that Infected were roaming about more than usual with no sign of letting up.

Maybe the local fortified but abandoned towns, like Geigertown, had had their fortifications disrupted, and the Infected inhabitants had escaped to terrorise the countryside. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened, though last time it had been Joanna Heights.

Grace had been hypothesising for weeks over the sudden increase in Infected, and his constantly analytical brain was starting to rub off on the rest of their little group.

Only a little, though. Victor shook his head and sniffed. He wasn't going to let Grace’s common sense rub off. 

God, they’d been killing Infected for weeks when Joanna Heights fell, and they’d had to use their much despised truck to drive the bodies out to dump them well away from any known hideout, so they could burn the bodies without accidently fucking up anyone’s lungs. Geigertown was even bigger, and Victor wasn’t looking forward to having to deal with yet more Infected. He was sick of it all.

He still couldn’t smoke in the bunker. No matter how stoned he got, it was never worth the hassle of dealing with Grace or Darin threatening to trash his whole stash of cigarettes and weed, or worse, give them to Ash.

Ash would bitch and moan if he learnt he smoked on this run too, but only when he learnt Victor had smoked alone, like a total hypocrite because he smoked alone.

Would do the fucker good to not smoke for once. His lungs must be seriously degrading from the amount he smoked, which given the fact that they lived in a wasteland caused by an airborne fungus, wasn’t exactly ideal.

But he wouldn’t find out, as Victor was going on this supply run alone, Darin had decreed it, so he dug in his pocket for a joint and his lighter, lifting both to his lips with a sigh of happiness. There would be no bitchy consequences to this.

Right on cue, like he had a sixth sense for weed, Ash seemed to jump out of nowhere, and he clapped Victor on the shoulders with a thin lipped smile that didn’t reach his eyes. Fucker had probably been following him since he left, and had been waiting for this moment, though why the fuck he was following him Victor didn’t know.

He froze in shock, eyes widening, but he didn’t drop the joint. Ash tugged it out of his mouth before he had the chance to react further, lit it up with a grin, and took a drag. “Thanks.” He grinned challengingly, eyes narrowed, and patted Victor’s cheek. Victor scowled and retrieved it from his programmer’s mouth to huff as large a mouthful as he could. He wasn’t letting Ash waste his weed.

“Fucker.” He expelled a mouthful of smoke. Most of it went to the sky, but after Ash released his mouthful at him, he blew what was left back. They huffed and puffed at each other for a minute, alternating drags, before descending into coughing fits loud enough to attract attention if anyone was around.

Luckily, no one seemed to be. These woods were long abandoned, Tourists were increasingly rare, what with increased hunter and Infected activity, and the birds were still singing. They’d be silent if Infected were around.

They weren’t alone for long.

“Can you two fuckers be trusted to not fucking smoke every time you fucking get outside?” Grace was several metres behind them and catching up fast. A look behind them showed he was scowling.

When he was right behind them, he smacked them both around the back of their heads, enough that Victor had to take a step to balance himself, before he slung his arms around their shoulders, snatched the joint, took a drag just to be a hypocrite, and stuffed it back in Victor’s mouth, preemptively answering the question entering Victor’s mind. “Fab listened in on the Suns’ radio broadcast from Philly. It started just after you left. There’s more Infected about, getting driven west, so we’ve been sent to join you. He and Darin are staying behind, keeping an eye on things, but you’re not gonna have to face Infected alone, or Jaxx. Especially when you’re full of pot.” Grace patted Victor’s cheek with a sickly smile. Victor scowled in response and took a drag.

“I’m not that stoned. And there’s been more Infected about for ages. Nothing I can’t handle myself, even if absolutely zooted.”

Grace shook his head. “Nah, there’s a whole swarm of them coming from Philly. The ‘cast said at least a few hundred, but probably far more. They’ll all go their own ways once they’re far out, but I don’t fancy your chances on your own, or any of us, against the number that’ll come through here, even if they’re in smaller groups. And I know you like the open air, but until they’ve been dealt with you should go the pipe route to Scarlets Mill. We all should. Too many abandoned towns are losing their fortifications, and the number of them that are full of late-stage Infected is too high.”

“Half the towns had no fortifications anyway. It’s just dumb tourists who break into these places and get themselves killed.” Victor took another drag and passed the joint to Ash before Grace’s words were properly processed. “Wait. Like the towns losing fortifications are mostly full of Clickers and Bloaters? And you don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s _those_ abandoned towns that are losing fortifications?” He whipped round to face Grace with an incredulous frown. The other side of Grace, Ash mirrored him, silently listening to their conversation.

Grace nodded with a frown. “Amity did this before, back in the early days, my mom said. It was how Arizona fell in line. But Arizona isn’t going to be Amity territory much longer from the looks of things, and neither’s California, not after LA. Nevada doesn’t have long left, and New Mexico’s certainly stirring the pot. Anyway. Philly’s been rioting like hell recently, and New York’s always been pretty restless. Boston won’t be far behind in unrest, they never usually are. And I’m almost certain the Suns already run the black market in Atlantic City, and their recent movements on the East Coast could have prompted Amity to make the countryside more dangerous to deter escape.”

“Amity are losing control.” They both jumped when Ash spoke up. He took another drag on the joint, but let Grace take over his train of thought.

“More people have been kicked out of QZs recently, there’s been so many food riots that no report can decide on an exact number of them, two religious cults, the Suns, and Dyad. The Mexican border has always been a pipeline, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they raised their head soon, be it openly letting deserters through instead of secretly or revealing their own resistance against Amity. Amity are facing their end. They can’t even operate the same in each QZ, so they all have different rules and regulations. Fuck - look at what happened to Seattle, way back before Amity. Amity will not last long. They’ll cling to power another few years, but not past,” he paused and frowned in thought. “Six years. I’ll give it six for us to have new masters.” He widened his eyes and wiggled his fingers with a smirk, like a cartoon wizard from the old faded children’s books they’d all been raised on. Then he scowled. “The Suns and the religious cults will probably sap Amity, but I bet Dyad will wind up in charge. They’re the only ones with the cohesion and power to do so, and they’re so silent for such a large player they’re surely up to something.”

“The Canadian lot?” Victor snatched the blunt to take a drag, and thought. “And I didn’t think there could be anything worse than Amity in charge of us all.”

Grace snorted, and Victor remembered BLI, but didn’t correct himself. 

“What the fuck are we to do?” Ash snatched the joint and stuffed it in his mouth. “I don’t know if we could take on a group like them.”

Grace huffed, exasperated. “No one’s going to take them on alone. Everyone will turn on them at some point. We’ll just have to team up.”

“Good luck with that,” Victor snorted, surprised at Grace’s unusual display of optimism. “Half the gangs all hate each other, and the other half avoid each other. Everyone mistrusts those not with them, and if any of the rumours about Dyad are true, then I don’t think anyone will want to fight them. We’ll all pussy out, or become their mindless goons.”

“How many people do you think will really be stupid enough to not band together?” Grace quirked a confident eyebrow and hip.

“I envy your faith in humanity,” Victor said darkly, taking the joint back.

“Just a little faith. You should try it. It’s good.”

“Ugh. You sound like one of the Crusaders,” Ash joked. Grace pulled a face, mumbling that he’d never join them, and Ash and Victor laughed and high fived. The noise was a clap like thunder in the leafy quiet, echoing off the trees and ringing around the surrounding forest.

Grace then froze, dragging them to a halt. “Guys, shut up for a second.” He frowned, head tilted, listening for something with widened eyes.

Victor and Ash cocked their heads and listened, too, unsure what they were listening for, until it hit them.

Ten minutes ago, the birds had been chirping away like they usually did.

Now they were silent.

Then they heard the clicking and screeching.

They jumped into action, all spinning round to try to spot the Clickers, peering through trees and foliage to see if they could even glimpse them yet, hands gravitating to weapons.

They couldn’t see the popcorn-headed fuckers yet.

“We can’t see them yet, and I don’t like that one bit. We don’t know how many there are, so go up a tree? Let them pass? If there’s not many we can jump back down and kill them.” Victor’s voice was a whisper. The other two nodded, and they split to make their way to a pair of trees. Victor chose an oak, stuffing the joint in his mouth and swinging himself up to a branch just above his head, and up another three, climbing and ducking to avoid greenery to the face like he was on autopilot.

He didn’t need to get right to the top of the tree, just seven or eight feet up, above head height, so he wouldn’t be spotted by the Clickers’ fucking echolocation.

And if the Clickers were going West as well, then that was a problem to deal with later.

Fuck. They probably would have to kill them.

Victor looked up, deciding to cross that bridge when he got to it.

Grace and Ash were in the same tree, perched on separate branches, clutching the trunk until he could see how white their knuckles were from ten feet away. He smirked, and made a show at Ash of blowing smoke. Ash scowled and flipped him off, and Grace rolled his eyes. Victor flipped Ash off whilst he smoked the rest of the joint as quickly as he could.

No point wasting good weed, even in the face of imminent danger and potential death.

Then the Clickers came into view.

If it was just one, they would probably kill it and hope the forest wasn’t dark enough and damp enough for spores to settle, but there were close enough to ten that Victor decided not to count, let alone kill.

But he was a bit of a wimp.

He held his breath when one walked right below him, and tried not to choke when it’s stench forced its way up his nose. He must have made a noise, because it paused below him, tipped its head back as it sensed something - _him_ \- opened its mouth, and _screeched_.

The hairs on Victor’s arms stood up, and he could feel himself begin to tremble. He looked away from the Clickers and tried to breathe through his mouth. If he stayed looking he’d lose his nerve and want to bolt, even though he knew that was futile.

Grace was watching the Infected with hawk-like precision, eyes focused and narrowed in a manner Victor could tell even from ten feet away in dappled forest. Ash looked like he was going to be sick, before he dragged his eyes up to Victor’s.

Then Grace removed his knife from its sheath under his jacket, and mimed stealth-killing one at Victor, eyebrows raised in question. Victor put a finger to his lips and shrugged. _Only if we can stay quiet_ . Ash widened his eyes and stuck his head out at them both in a clear mime of _what the fuck is wrong with you two?!_

Grace gave them a chillingly sunny grin and made his way to the ground with terrifying quiet. Victor was struck by a quiet thought that thank god Grace was not his enemy, but then he and Ash climbed down and snuck after the Infected, and there was no time to think.

The first four were dispatched quickly and quietly, but then Grace fumbled with his knife, and the fifth Clicker screeched. The remaining three turned around and screeched too, and started charging at them.

They shot them down.

Each took two shotgun slugs to down, which wasn’t bad, but the noise! They really needed silencers for their guns, but they needed to leave more.

“We gotta go. More’ll be on the way.” Grace voiced his thoughts.

“We should hurry, otherwise the return journey will be dreadful. Ash, do you wanna call it in to Fab, let him know about Clickers on route and that we’ll be a while?”

Ash nodded, wiping at his face with a shaking hand. Blood came off, and he wiped his hands on his pants. Victor wiped at his face, and blood came off on him too. He didn’t want to think about how much was probably on him, or how much would be on him before he got home.

Grace didn’t bother wiping the blood. It made freckles across his cheek and nose, making him look younger for a second, but then he set his jaw grimly and pushed on forwards, and he looked older again. Ash made the call on his walkie talkie with still-shaking hands, but his voice was even and determined.

He was always far more calm than he appeared, if a bit too prone to excessive caution and a strange, personal fear of Clickers. Victor only ever hoped for his level of calm.

He just wiped his hand on his jeans, but the blood didn’t come off. He spat and rubbed, and it transferred.

Any effect the weed might have had was offset by the group of fucking Clickers, so he just trudged on miserably, trying to focus on anything but Infected or lack of weed.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Left, right.

Okay maybe he wasn’t as sober as he thought.

That should have filled him with unease, especially in a forest potentially crawling with Infected, but he just felt glad. The weed hadn’t been wasted, and that was what mattered. Not the stupid fucking Infected.

He kept his gaze to his boots so Grace wouldn’t try and bug him for being stoned in the face of Infected, and decided to take stock of what he saw whilst he was looking down there, check the damage for what needed repairing when he got back.

His left boot was scuffed to hell, and he could see the shit job he’d done repairing the toe last time he’d stitched it up, the pink thread a stark polkadot of colour against the black leather. The laces were old and worn, laced as high as they went and the remainder filled in with scrap ribbon they traded far too much for. The garish green and blue ribbon might be only a few inches long, but for some reason Victor prized it above the rest of the shoelace. The main shoelace was easily replaceable, but the ribbon was personal, and his.

The right boot had been patched up with brown leather on the outer side, and the eyelets needed either resewing or replacing. The tongue was beginning to rot, as was the heel, from water and Bloater acid damage.

All in all, they were in surprisingly good shape for how long he’d had them.

He still should probably get new boots, but good boots were hard to come by, and he’d rather trade the parts to repair the damage. Call him sentimental. He didn’t care.

“I like the green and blue,” Ash said quietly next to him, bumping his shoulder whilst they walked.

Victor bumped back, wondering how long he’d been staring at his boots for. Long enough to draw attention to himself. “When I get rid of the boots I’ll keep the ribbon. Dunno where I’ll tie it, but I wanna keep it.”

“Those boots will last years.” But there was none of the usual sternness to Grace’s tone, and his face held none of the sternness either. “They’ll outlast Amity,” he joked with a half smile, but their conversation before the Clickers haunted them, and his smile dropped.

“I hope they outlast Dyad too. I hope they see a better world than we’ve known.” His voice was quiet, but Victor didn’t know how to express the longing he felt for a time he never knew, and a person he’d never see again.

His mom had had many stories from before the world went to shit, and she had told him them so many times he knew them all off by heart, but he missed hearing them from her, missed sitting in front of the fire whilst she leant back in her chair and regaled tales of her youth and the culture it was in her slow, steady voice, sardonic humour an embellishment he’d always loved. He hoped she was back on Rhode Island, running her pirate radio station with the same sardonic steadiness.

But she was probably a prisoner of Amity.

Or dead.

He’d started up his radio station after he’d first got off Rhode Island so he could keep an ear on her after the raid, to try and see how she was. There had been silence though, since he’d left, and he’d had to face the fact that there was probably not a good reason she was silent. The bombings and raids in the months after he’d left had convinced him that no one survived the island, and he’d mostly given up.

“She might be fine, just underground.” Grace put his hand on his shoulder, having dropped back to study the pair.

He always was uncannily good at knowing what they all were thinking.

“For ten years? The whole island?” Victor sighed. Ash silently offered up a cigarette. “No. I’m an adult. I’ve already faced the fact that she’s probably dead. Dead like the rest of them.” He sniffed, trying to push away the tearful longing in favour of pulling a face. Ash lit the cigarette and stuffed it between Victor’s lips. He took a drag, sighed, and offered it back. Smoking all of Ash’s cigarettes wouldn’t change his mother’s mortality status, despite the help the nicotine offered. Ash rejected it with a wave.

Victor was powerless, and he hated it.

He had been for years. He should just either return to the island - certain death - or suck it up and move on.

“Hey! Hope will get you further than resignation.” Grace’s voice was steady, his hand equally steady on his shoulder.

 _Then why don’t you follow your own damn logic?_ “Until it doesn’t. Pragmatism goes further in the long run.” He popped his neck and gave Grace a steady, steely stare. Grace returned the look, equally steely, and took his hand away.

“You two should really have the opposite outlooks, considering your personalities,” Ash said. His words were partially obscured by a sandwich. Victor scoffed, not bothering to wonder when Ash pulled it out. He always had food on him.

“You got any more sandwich in that pack of yours?”

Ash grunted and dug around in his bag for more food, and came up with another sandwich. Victor took it and decided not to ask what was in it. Nicotine might not help his grief much but food did, at least a bit more so, so he chewed as mindlessly as he could and tried to pretend that Ash made good food.

“One foot in front of the other,” Grace said as evenly as he could. It wasn’t much, but it helped a bit.

He was trying, but he wasn’t a patient man by nature.

Neither was Victor.

“One day at a time,” he replied, trying to keep the sharpness out of his tone. The sandwich helped, muffling his voice enough that he just sounded defeated.

“One day at a time,” Grace returned, the sharpness kept in his tone, stepping forward to face him and belligerently square against him.

Victor felt cold all over with anger at what Grace was implying, but Ash stepped between them before anything could erupt. Grace just stood like a monolith opposite him, arms crossed, jaw set.

“Take it out back home, or on Infected,” Ash breathed. He was watching the two of them from Victor’s peripheral vision.

Victor stepped back and took a breath, not wanting to take his eyes off of Grace just yet.

Fighting him wasn’t worth it. Not here, and not now.

Grace evidently supposed the same, for he stepped back too and took a breath, mouth a thin line of unimpressed boredom. Then he turned and headed onwards.

Fighting him was never worth it.

Grace might have the bigger temper, but he also had the pragmatism to know when to choose his battles, and to diffuse battles he didn’t want to deal with. Victor could only follow and deal with it.

Sometimes, Victor decided bitterly, he hated that he had to go off of other’s emotions so much. He could seethe and boil over the smallest of things or feel nothing over the best or worst news, but he never knew how he was _supposed_ to feel, so he had to rely on everyone else to know how to react. He knew it made him a hindrance to their group, and he suspected that one day Grace’s patience would finally run out, and he would kick him out and let him fend for himself, or he would choose to leave, saying _no hard feelings_ even as he walked away from them, taking out his hard feelings on branches and vines with the machete that seemed to live on his hip.

“You both need proper food. And sleep. You’ve both done all the night shifts this week,” Ash spoke like they didn’t know they’d been doing that for the past week, and it began to grate on Victor’s already fraying temper. He chewed on sandwich, deciding that was a better use of his time than picking a stupid argument over nothing.

Maybe food and rest _would_ do him good. He sighed. “I’ll sleep when I get back. We’ve got a job to do.”

“And eat something that isn’t my shitty sandwiches.” Next to him, Ash sounded contrite.

He was a shit chef, barely able to make a sandwich that suited anyone’s tastes other than his own, and he was never allowed near food that had to be cooked. They’d all suffered food poisoning from his efforts one too many times to want to let him cook anymore.

“It’s food. I didn’t eat this morning,” Victor admitted. Despite the foul taste of whatever filling Ash deemed acceptable, his stomach rumbled. “I didn’t have time. But it’s good. It’s filling.”

“Good _or_ filling?” But Ash was smiling, so Victor allowed his lips to quirk up, and he gently bumped into Ash’s shoulder.

“I don’t know what it’s like,” Grace said quietly, stopping to turn, holding Victor’s gaze in such a serious manner Victor had the urge to squirm. “I didn’t- I wasn’t implying-” He huffed and broke off, looking away before they could see his cheeks redden.

Grace might be many things, and he might have a talent for many things, but verbal apologies were not one of them.

Victor had let that go years ago. It was the only thing he was better at, it seemed, and he hated holding a grudge.

“I need to get my shit together. That’s all you meant.” Victor’s own voice was quiet, his half smile sad. Grace swallowed and nodded, realising Victor just wanted him to drop it, and carried on walking, ducking a vine and chopping at a branch with his machete.

“You two good? I don’t want to have to deal with you two in a huff whilst we’re trying to trade.”

“I’m good,” Victor said. He knew he sounded listless, but Grace just snorted and affirmed he wasn’t going to start shit, and headed on towards Scarlets Mill. Victor and Ash had little choice but to follow him, trudging onwards.

When they got back to their shack, Fab was giving a broadcast. He only just raised his eyes from his script to acknowledge them, and tipped his head and smiled in greeting. Victor gave him a little wave, too tired to want to smile much. Ash grinned wildly at Fab, but he had been the most successful in trading and bartering, so he had more to be glad about. Grace was behind Victor, and he couldn’t see him.

When they went down into the bunker, blinking at the dark, they found Darin cleaning the rest of their weapons, bathed in a small pool of light from a lamp. Ash wiped fresh Infected blood from his face - a small pack of Runners had wandered into their path on the return journey - and smeared his bloody hand on Darin’s head with a smirk. Darin yelled and dropped his weapons to give chase, and Ash bolted with a bark of laughter towards the showers.

Grace chuckled at them and dumped his supplies down in the designated kitchen area. The tap made a screech as he turned it on to wash his hands and arms, and then he stripped to his waist to scrub himself clean so he could fix up some food.

Probably soup. He made good soup, and he made it a lot. Victor’s stomach rumbled at the thought of food.

“Go shower,” Victor said, pausing scrubbing a particularly sticky blood spatter on his hip, where Runner blood had soaked through his shirt, to look up at him. Victor felt a pang when he realised his lip was badly split from where he’d missed the Runner’s blow, even though Grace was smiling through the pain. “I’ll get you some real food you can have after, not Ash’s shit.” He gave a laugh, and Victor gave as much of a smile as he could. Ash’s sandwiches were legendarily foul.

“Thanks.” Victor dumped his supplies down next to Grace’s, wanting to say something else but not knowing what, and headed after Ash and Darin, humming to himself and thinking thoughts of warm water and being clean, and hot bread and soup, and a nap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my god the typos i’ve found on tonight’s edit it’s gonna be same clown different circus shit.


	3. Chapter 3

North Carolina, Wednesday decided, digging into a can of the worst potato stew he’d ever made, was quickly becoming an absolute fucking shitshow. Infected were crawling out of the fucking woodwork, Amity had fallen back to pretty much just Raleigh and some farming towns outside the city, and Charlotte and the remaining cities had taken Amity’s newfound absence as the opportunity for the Suns and the Final Crusade to duke it out for control of the city, which left most of the surviving quarantine zones impassable hellholes rigged with explosives and traps and boarded up buildings just waiting for someone to discover and die to the hordes of Infected trapped within.

And then there were so many lone groups and gangs, all with the objective of killing and looting anyone not a part of their group.

Why he and his lot still lived in the city was fucking beyond him, but he didn’t know where else they could go and stay together, so maybe it was just sentimentality that kept them there.

“We could just leave the Network in the hands of Motionless, or control it remotely,” Joey suggested, digging into his can of stew with a spoon, feet up on the table in a languid, relaxed way Wednesday could never achieve. He didn’t even seem to be disliking the stew all that much. “We could just go.”

“And go where?” Wednesday sighed, putting his can down with a frown. They’d had this conversation too many times, and retreading old ground was beginning to get fucking tiresome.

Joey huffed and rolled his eyes, frustrated. “Iowa. I told you this! I got contacts everywhere, but mainly up there, and they’ll help us resettle, set up a new station.” A blessing of being affiliated with a group of the more infamous rebels. “We could carry on like nothing happened.”

There was still one gaping hole in his plan, though, one that never seemed to go away however much Joey insisted, like he thought brute stubbornness would prevail. “How would we get there? It’s across half the fucking country, and the part of the country that’s an absolute minefield. The Midwest is  _ literally  _ the most dangerous terrain in the whole country, and going around it would only work if we crossed the desert; and that would be almost more dangerous. I’m not sure what would kill us more; the radiation or the heat.”

Joey clammed up and scowled.

“Or the gangs and tribes out there,” Eric piped up. “I heard some of them are cannibals and some are genuinely friendlies, but they all welcome people in, and you’d never know the difference between them until you’re strapped down to their table getting cut open for food.”

Wednesday decided he wasn’t done, but ignored Eric. Some of the gangs out in the desert might be vicious, but the cannibalism was just a rumour. The cannibals all lived in the mountains in Colorado and Wyoming, anyway. “And why would we all go there anyway, even if it was an easy destination? Eric and Ben are from Boston, and Acey’s from New York.” Pennsylvania, but whatever. It wasn’t west, and it drove the point home. “You’re the only one with contacts - or even remotely any ties - up there, but there aren’t many people who’d accept us as a whole, there or anywhere. And we’ve all got lives elsewhere, or other ties taking us to other places. Acey has family to find, Ben and Eric have contacts they know and trust instead of strangers’ mercy, and I’ve got a network down here, across the state. The only thing taking us to Iowa is your insistence.”

“Let’s just stay here for as long as we can,” Acey said blankly, staring into space, dark circles rooted under his eyes. He didn’t seem to realise he’d interrupted them, his food mostly untouched in front of him. Wednesday felt pathetically glad he had interrupted, because Joey looked so fucking petulant, and he was seriously at his limit with him. “Everywhere else sucks. Might as well stay here until we can’t.”

Wednesday thought of something to say, but paused. He softened and picked his food up again, eating without another word, stabbing potato with his fork like it had personally offended him.

It had personally offended him, by tasting so shite.

Joey took another mouthful of stew, making eye contact with Wednesday after Acey’s interruption, stubbornness forgotten.

Acey had come south from just outside one of the New York QZs, chasing a rumour. Someone had apparently told him that his family were part of the mass exodus from Philly, that they had been sent to Raleigh, and he’d chased that rumour until he’d been told another, to look for them in Charlotte.

It had been a year and a half, and he hadn’t found anything. It was doubtful he ever would. Whoever told him his family was here had most likely just wanted him to fuck off from Raleigh, not that Wednesday had the heart to tell him.

He probably never would find anything here. There was nothing in Charlotte for people to come to, and it was unlikely his family had come here before the QZ fell. Either his family were still in Philly, or they’d escaped to the surrounding towns with the rest of the refugees not deemed suitable enough for Amity to waste time and resources looking after.

Or they were dead or Infected.

But he couldn’t say that to Acey, so he just held his tongue and let Joey finally splutter that they’d already stayed as long as they could, that it wasn’t safe here, that anywhere would be better than here, before he launched into a tirade Wednesday ignored, too busy focusing on their future and trying to shovel down stew.

They couldn’t stay here, and they couldn’t leave together. Nobody wanted to go to the same destination, and they’d all be miserable for one person’s happiness. They were damned if they tried to leave together, and damned if they didn’t. He sighed and put his head into his hands.

This was gonna be the end of their gang. Joey would be adamant about going back to Iowa, even with the war zones he’d have to cross, back home to fields and guerilla warfare. Active rebellion was more his taste than reporting on it, let alone reporting on anti-Amity turf wars, but he craved a spotlight in a way Wednesday couldn’t understand, and he was getting far too restless. The journey home would sate him until he found his old people.

He just wanted Amity goons to beat up, and no affiliations with some larger movement to steal his glory.

A martyr against Amity.

Wednesday might follow Joey, as he didn’t have much better to do, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He had his own contacts in NC, his own people he could join up with scattered across the state, so he might head towards them, or out east towards the coast, to Kitty Hawk. There was Sun activity there, and he might be good for them, with his contacts and ability to gather intel. Iowa was too far for him, too dangerous, and he had even less certainty of finding a new home there. At least he knew NC, knew where he could find safety and shelter, to stock up on supplies and crash out for a night.

Yeah, however much he liked Joey, and would try to keep in contact with him, he didn’t plan on leaving NC.

Ben would either go home to Boston or follow up on his drunken wistful dreams of heading out west, following the coast down south then across the desert to Santa Barbara, despite the dangers posed in the journey. He wanted a more active role than reporting too, but in helping out with the Suns, no infamy attached to his name. A silent helper against Amity, nothing more.

But he was the selfless one, pragmatic and uncaring about fame or notoriety.

If Ben went back to Boston, Eric would follow like a little lost puppy like he almost always did. Out west was a different story, however. Ben might be all he had, but he wasn't going to follow him west. He’d outright refused to cross the deserts to get to Cali on multiple occasions, deciding it was too dangerous for him. What he’d do if Ben did head out west, Wednesday didn’t know. Stay with him instead, probably, or head back north on his own, to wherever he’d been before he joined them.

Acey would either stay to find his family, or go back north. He was the newest to their group, and the odd one out, so in truth there was little keeping him here already. Even now he was still distant, distant enough Wednesday was surprised he hadn’t left months ago.

“We all wanna go different places.” Wednesday interrupted Joey, having ignored him so far, and settled with the look Joey was giving him. “We stay here for another month, or longer if it still looks good, then go our separate ways and try to stay in contact with each other. Maybe we carry on the radio station, or hand it over to Motionless and his lot. But we stay on the waves for as long as we can, checkin’ in daily or whatever.” Joey opened his mouth, but Wednesday cut him off. “No. You wanna go back to Iowa, but we don’t fucking wanna. We carry on together for as long as we can here, and then go where we want to.”

Joey scowled and gestured with his spoon. “Where would you all go? I’ve got the people and space to make room for us, so we should all stay together. It makes no sense to split up.”

Wednesday rolled his eyes and groaned, frustration ramping up. He hated Joey’s obstinate arguing, and he really hated his stupid fucking ‘main-character-complex’ that made him think he was boss and his word was law, but snapping and snarling wouldn’t do them much good. “We’ve been over this before, Joey. Ben will either go to Boston or Cali, Eric’s got a place back north, Acey still hasn't found his family, and I’ll stay in NC. Kitty Hawk seems like a good place.”

“That’s the end of us!” Joey glared, indignant that the group he’d put together was falling apart. “We’ll probably never see each other again if we split up!”

Wednesday opened his mouth to argue, but then softened. “Maybe that’ll be for the best. I love you all, but we’re all different people with different wants, and compromises only get us so far. We can’t go somewhere the rest of us will be miserable at, so we might as well split but stay in contact, and hope we do see each other again.”

“We’re damned if we stay and damned if we leave together, so we choose the third option,” Ben said, but it was more of a question. Wednesday didn’t know when he’d walked in, but he nodded. Ben speared potato from his can in response.

“We stay together for as long as possible, but when the going gets good we leave. We can all travel together for a while, but if you wanna go to Iowa, Joey, you’ll wind up peeling off near Raleigh or Greensboro.”

“And y’all’ll stay together until Kitty Hawk?” He scoffed in manner so condescending Wednesday half wanted to smack him, frustration returning.

He shook his head instead, opting for the peaceful option. “That’s too far east. If Ben’s goin’ south he’ll split off near Greenville to head down to Wilmington. If Eric and Acey are going back north they’ll part with me near Tarboro. Then I just follow the 64 to its end. I got people in Elizabeth City and Columbia, and maybe someone in Wanchese, if he’s still there, so it shouldn’t be too tricky.”

“I'll decide if I’m heading back to Boston or to Cali when I’m there.” Ben speared potato and stuck it in his mouth decisively.

“I’ll go back to Boston. There’s more I can do there.” Eric paused. “Or follow Ben south and stay in Florida.”

That was new. Wednesday sat up straight, and turned to frown at Eric. “Why Florida? It’s a shithole.”

“The gang who passed through a while back and got stuck with me in the No-Pass, you know, with the blonde woman? She offered me a place with her lot. I turned it down back then, but she said she’d have a place for me if I needed it. If I can’t find anything in Boston I’ll go to Florida.”

“If I can’t find anything in Philly I’ll go back to White Plains.” Acey was still speaking blankly, still staring into space. “I’ll join up with my old gang again.”

Joey huffed, still obstinate and arrogant. “Why not go out west with me, Ben? It’ll be far quicker than south and around? Boston isn’t a war zone yet but it will be soon, we all know it, and what if the Florida group are dead? And what if the New York group aren’t there? You have no certainty. I could offer it.”

“If we don’t die getting there. And I like the coastal route. It’s safer, and there’s more I can do than just trekking across minefields avoiding soldiers.” Ben sounded wistful. “I can help out in towns along the way, with, like, fishing, or defending against Infected, or whatever help they need. And I can keep an eye out for my next destination, see what the road ahead’s like.” 

Joey scowled and opened his mouth again, always ready to argue.

Wednesday had had enough. He slammed his fist onto the table in frustration, nearly knocking his dinner over, and grabbed at the can to stop it toppling onto the floor. “God fuckin’ dammit Joey! I mean it! We’re not going to fuckin’ Iowa cuz we don’t fuckin’ wanna! For once in your life just stop being so fuckin’ dense!” Silence fell. He sighed, and covered his face with his hand, already half-regretting his outburst. “If it all fails and we turn up on your doorstep you have every right to say ‘I told you so’, but we’ve all got better ties elsewhere, or shit we need to close off. You’re infamous, and I appreciate all the help it’s brought, and I appreciate all you’ve done for us, and I know it’ll be dangerous for you to go back there on your own, but we’re not dogs for you to drag around. I wanna keep in contact, but I can't go to Iowa. None of us can.”

Silence continued to reign, and Joey stared at him, impassive and sulking.

Then he slumped down in his seat, defeated. “We should start preparing to go soon, then.” His voice wasn’t as sullen as Wednesday had been expecting, more sad.

Wednesday made an attempt to offer an olive branch. “We can travel together to Greensboro, and that’s fuckin’ miles away. It’ll be ages before we go our separate ways. I’m sorry, dude.” He debated patting Joey’s shoulder, his hand crawling across the table towards him.

“Don’t be.” Joey waved him off, and the urge to offer comfort faded. He retracted his hand and stared numbly at his stew, growing cold in front of him. He took another mouthful.

Then Joey stood, carefully not looking at him. Ice settled in his stomach, and stuffing potato in his mouth didn’t seem to help. “Well, I got a show to do, so I’ll catch you lot later?”

“Yeah.” Wednesday nodded, and put his dinner down. Joey left the room without another word.

“I’d like to go to Iowa,” Acey said flatly, after silence sat heavy like a lead weight for several minutes. Wednesday started, but let him talk. Eric and Ben looked up at Acey, their faces twin masks of pity. Wednesday idly wondered if his face made three. “I can’t and I won’t, and getting there would be hell, but it would be nice there, away from the QZs and Undergrounds. Farmhouses and peace. No having to be on the run or hide from soldiers, or worry about setting off explosions. Just peace.”

“I wish we could go there too. Peace sounds good.” Eric sighed, and blew on his tea to cool it before taking a sip.

“Peace isn’t for people like us.” Wednesday knew how small his voice sounded, but didn’t care. “We’re too nosy and rebellious for peace. We get tired, so fuckin’ tired and we still carry on cuz that’s what we think we should do.”

Acey laughed humorlessly, harshly, then dug back into his dinner silently, slouched over his can. Three mouthfuls later he put the can down. Wednesday could see from his seat it was still half full.

It was probably cold. Cold stew was gross, and Acey never had much of an appetite to begin with. Too many horrors, too much grief. Tepid soggy potato did nothing to help, only sit in a stomach like a great stone.

Whoever thought that food helped everything was a fucking moron. Wednesday snorted to himself and watched Acey stir his food around.

He was only five years older than Wednesday, but sometimes he seemed far older, eyes too dark for someone so young, demeanour too harsh. Usually he was miserable and listless when he wasn’t occupied with perimeter duty or report gathering, but when on any sort of duty he almost scared Wednesday with his vigilance. 

Losing your parents and hunting for them for five fruitless years would do that to you, though, or at least that was what Acey had snapped at Joey on the rare occasion he was sufficiently angered to snap. Grief turns to dread,  _ and there’s no fucking relief, Joey, but you wouldn’t fucking know that, so leave me the fuck alone! _

It was the not knowing that was the most painful, Wednesday assumed, though his experiences with loss were nothing like Acey’s.

It was a valid assumption, if not outright correct. He wasn’t a fucking psychic, but he didn’t need to be to have some kind of understanding of Acey’s grief.

Wednesday choked at the sudden pang in his chest at Acey’s acquiescence at their lack of peace, and carried on with his food. There wasn’t anything he could say to lift his mood, only let him stew in it until it went away.

Talking of stew, his was getting worse by the second. If he wasn’t so hungry he’d give up on it, but it was filling, and he needed to eat.

“Iowa wouldn’t be peaceful anyway,” he decided, hoping against hope that it would help somehow. “It’s a damn minefield. Once Amity lose control it’ll be peaceful, but until then it’s probably more dangerous there than anywhere else at the moment.” He paused, and softened. The oil-lamp-light flickered, making his company seem almost like ghosts in the bunker. “After Amity, it would be nice to go there.”

“Yeah.”

Ben leant across to rub Acey’s shoulder comfortingly. Acey hummed and knocked shoulders with him, face still slack.

Wednesday made some bullshit excuse to leave and headed up to the booth on the roof to sit alone with his thoughts and a bottle of shit whiskey under the guise of a last shift up top before he went to bed. 

He got woken up by the horrible feeling of someone looming over him in the cold room. The only sounds were Joey’s snoring, and the quiet sound of breathing above him.

Freezing and holding his breath, because there was always the fear that an Infected had got in, he held his breath and hoped they would go away, trying to peer in the dark at what was standing over him whilst his heart thudded so hard in his chest he feared it might hear it and he trembled with cold and fear. Sweat began to bead on his forehead.

He couldn’t wipe it away. He couldn’t move, and fear was beginning to take over, ratcheting up quickly, heart thumping wildly.

They didn’t leave. Wednesday was beginning to try to settle that this was how he’d die, for he had no weapons nearby, and it must be a Stalker to be so quiet but standing over him like it knew he was there, and they’d sense if he moved, when a hesitant voice spoke in the dark. He jumped violently for a second.

“Weds? You awake?”

Acey. He took a shaky few breaths to calm himself, trying to get his heartbeat to slow down. Acey apologised for scaring him.

Joey let out an unusually loud snore, rolled over, and buried his face in his pillow.

“I am awake.”  _ Now.  _ “What’s up, dude? What time even is it?” He yawned and rubbed his eyes, sitting up. Acey flicked the oil lamp by Wednesday’s pallet on. He blinked at the sudden light, right in his face, and made a noise. Joey snored again.

If Wednesday wasn’t so tired and rattled he’d throw a pillow at Joey.

Although that would require retrieving it and dealing with the manlet tantrum that would ensue, so it was probably a good thing he was too tired to do so.

“I dreamt of them.” Acey’s voice was small, but it brought his focus back to him.

He didn’t need to say who. Wednesday shuffled to the side of his bed, making room, Joey forgotten. “C’mon.”

Acey climbed in next to him with an apologetic thanks, cheeks dark with shame, unable to look at him. Wednesday grunted that it was no problem, only focused on getting back to sleep, trying to push concern away, only reaching to flick the lamp off.

Acey’s nightmares might not be frequently addressed, but the dark circles he usually bore, and his near-permanent bone-tired exhaustion meant they didn’t have to be. Sleeping next to someone else was the only thing he’d said ever gave him a dreamless night, though he still tried to sleep alone as much as he could. Wednesday didn’t think he truly trusted them yet, or thought that sleeping with someone else was a show of weakness. He only crawled into someone else’s bed when the nightmares were so unbearable he couldn’t sleep for days at a time, and was scared of falling asleep on perimeter duty, perched in the little wooden booth on the roof with a vantage point of all their land.

Wednesday wrapped his arms around him, hands rubbing his sides in as calming a gesture he could think of.

Acey sniffed. “I’m sorry.”

He sounded tearful, or at least choked up. It was the least Wednesday should do to offer a bit more comfort, so he tried.

“Don’t be. We’ve all shared beds before, in winter when it gets cold as balls, so it’s nothing, and you need some fuckin’ sleep. Can’t have you falling asleep in the day,” he joked, and rubbed his arm to show he wasn’t being serious. Acey sniffed again, still stiff as a board with shame, but gave a humourless chuckle.

Wednesday wondered if he’d accidentally upset him with his final statement. He accidentally nudged the back of Acey’s neck with his nose when he hugged him closer in a move of affection he wasn’t used to being on either end of, trying to dispel any hard feelings. Acey made a surprised squeaking noise, tensing for a second, and then relaxed into his embrace with a small sigh, his breathing beginning to even out, an idle hand on Wednesday’s like he didn’t really believe Wednesday was being this nice. 

He really needed to learn to relax and trust people, but it wasn’t any of Wednesday’s business, and he wouldn’t know how to broach the topic even if it was. He just continued hugging him from behind and hoped it helped, hoped it said words that he’d never allow to pass his lips, even in the dead of night when nothing seemed to really exist.

They both fell back asleep fairly quickly, the shared body heat a welcome thing in the cold room. The bunker was always kind of cold, even in the heat of summer. A benefit of living mostly underground, until night fell and shivering could keep them awake.

Neither dreamed, and if the events of the night were kept between themselves, it was because they didn’t know how to talk about it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here’s the KMFDM chapter! It’s probably my favourite so far, and describing the food was fun. I hope you like it!

Sascha dispatched the screaming, dangling Stalker with a vicious machete slash to the head, severing a frond of fungus in his violence, and then reached up above the Stalker’s ankle to loosen the rope on the trapwire to pull it free.

He would have done the lazy thing of just cutting the rope, but that meant making another one, and they were getting low on those kinds of resources.

The Infected fell down and crunched against the cold hard ground. The skull fractured on a raised tree root, bone fragments and fungus spilling out in a wet, stinking mess. He crouched to study it, wrinkling his nose at the stench of death and disease, of rotting meat and something horribly wet and dead, and stood, prepared to empty the contents of a Molotov over it to burn it.

This was gonna fucking reek.

Once, it had been a woman. Scared and most likely alone, because no one came to Seattle anymore, there was little reason to. She had probably been from one of the towns outside the city, but had had to leave for whatever reason. Chasing after a loved one, or ostracised and forced out. They seemed to be the only reasons for lone Tourists in town anymore.

Or deserters from the FC or one of the resistance movements. The more time passed, the more extreme all the various movements seemed to become, and extremism apparently caused a haemorrhage of followers, even as more joined. That was far more common out east, but then again, Seattle wasn’t exactly like the other QZs and settlements they’d come across, so he supposed it made sense she could be a deserter.

But then she had been infected.

The fungal plates were more antler-like stalks and fronds sprouting off her head than proper plates yet, and her face had been only slightly distended and distorted before she was dropped on it, so she must have been infected only about a month or so ago. Long enough for her bones to become weaker and more brittle, but recent enough that the Clicker stage was well away. She looked more like one of those funny frond-headed creatures they’d seen in the aquarium when they first arrived in Seattle than part of some fungus. 

He’d spent long enough musing over the corpse that Lucia had finished checking the remaining pockets of her Clicker, and had come over to check his Stalker. The Clicker was burning now, the pyre hot enough to heat him up from fifteen feet away, even in the constant drizzle. The stench was vile, too, hot rotten flesh and a second scent he always hoped wasn’t spores but would rather not know.

If a dead Infected stank anyway, their pyres were far worse.

“She was only infected about a month ago,” Lucia assessed, backing up his suspicion. He nodded, silent and still assessing the soggy corpse, prodding away to look at a patch on its jacket.

It was too destroyed to discern anything.

She straightened with a frown, pocketing another switchblade for her collection. He cleaned his on his jacket and stood next to her. “What's got your tongue?”

There were many things he could say, but instead he sighed. “The outbreak happened over sixty years ago.”

“You’re surprised there’s still an infection.”

“Nah. Not  _ surprised _ . But why the fuck did no one ever make a fucking cure? Or some kinda vaccine? I know there were the efforts in the twenties and thirties, but nothing since then. Why would they just give up?”

She huffed. “FEDRA probably lacked the funds or control, given how they barely hung on until Amity, and Amity don’t want the old world back. This world suits them better.”

“Less of a chance for their nepotism in the old world.”

Lucia offered her lighter silently. Sascha took it and stepped back to burn the Infected corpse before the spores had the chance to spread in the damp Seattle woodland. They might not get too bad for a while, but the bodies would be covered further by winter, and the snows would protect them until the spring.

And then they’d really be a problem.

They walked away from the pyres.

“Only those two on the perimeter today so far,” Lucia remarked, shouldering her shotgun a few minutes later.

Sascha scoffed, checking through his ammo absently. Better to check now than when they came across an enemy. “We’ve been here a month. Probably killed most of them off by now.”

“It’s still surprising there’s this many in town. The Suns aren’t exactly holed up away here in some poky little hideout, and they’re not the only ones in town. There’s some of everyone here. Even if people keep to their patches it’s still a surprise there’s this many Infected everywhere.” Lucia readjusted her gun on her shoulder again, then made an irritated noise as she assessed her machete and found the blade blunt. Too many skulls had dulled it. Sascha offered his spare one. She took it and sheathed it.

“Everyone wants some of Seattle.” He sighed, wondering if he’d made a mistake coming here.

Well, it beat the New York QZs, which amounted to something, so he decided he shouldn’t fuss over it too much. If the others wanted to leave they’d have voiced it by now, and they were safe in their base. “No one mans the QZ walls anymore, and the city was abandoned over a decade before Fedra fell. Some group called the WLF.” He nodded at the letters conveniently sprayed on a wall, ten feet high. “Amity never took an interest in the city, so I imagine parts of the walls deteriorated, or the remaining inhabitants became Infected and infected others. And everyone who survived is still locked in turf war after turf war, so I guess nobody has the time or safety to really deal with the Infected.” Sascha knocked shoulders with her, and faked a stagger to the side when she knocked back, grinning.

She returned the smile. “Or it's like Santa Barbara.”

They paused and exchanged a look, and Lucia backtracked, paling slightly, her smile fading. “I know they all kept Infected like pets to torture, not as weapons. But they did weaponise the Infected against each other’s gangs if the chance arose.”

He let it slide, knowing what she meant. “And now everyone knows we’re here we’ll be the latest targets.” But Sascha knew he didn’t look pensive or scared. Let them come. He could protect him and his own. They were all skilled fighters, and organised, militarised rebel groups hadn’t existed since the Wolves fell, despite the Fireflies’ multiple failed attempts to regroup at Catalina Island. The Suns and the Flood might claim to be two big groups, but they were both just made up of small groups with the same aims and an uneasy alliance binding them together. The Final Crusade was more organised, and they were just a bunch of nutters who used the Infected against anyone who disagreed with them and then picked off the survivors for either ammo fodder or recruitment. The other lot were way out east, of no concern to anyone outside of the Bible Belt.

And everyone pretty much stayed to the districts they’d captured, and bombed the hell out of each other when riled.

Yeah, he and his lot were pretty safe.

“It’s all Pig’s fault.” Lucia was grinning, though. Sascha returned it. It was always Pig’s fault.

“He’s always down for a fight. The traps are a good idea, but he fights way more than he should. Draws unnecessary attention.”

“Preachin’ to the choir.” She chuckled, head tipped back, throat exposed to the forest; a vengeful, cunning goddess in a world of death and destruction. “He takes risks he shouldn’t, and he’s lucky he’s got us.”

“How does it take twelve people to manage his bullshit?” Sascha laughed too, the sound bouncing off the trees and muffling before it travelled far, and knew he made the god cunning and clever enough to equal hers; rulers of their own little kingdom. “Nah, we all handle ourselves well. He’s more than manageable. Anyway, it gives us some fun round here whilst we pause and plan and catch our breath.”

“Practice,” Lucia said, almost correcting him like she knew the real reason Sascha had suggested coming here. He looked away guiltily for a second, but then decided he had nothing to feel guilty about.

He’d never outright said why he wanted to come up here from Brooklyn. It was a perilously long journey, months and months of trekking across warzone after warzone, riling up towns as they went, and it wasn’t exactly the most obvious destination for rebels looking for a break. There was only one thing he could be planning here. There wasn’t anything else to do, despite his talk of recuperation.

Except he wasn’t looking to unite the gangs and groups here anymore in quite the same way he had planned. He had misjudged the rivalries and vendettas, and a whole new plan had to be made. One was beginning to unfurl in his mind, but it was still cautious. It would likely be a long time until he could create anything concrete, however frustrating that might be, but he’d learnt patience long ago, and knew he could wait.

They’d only been here a month, so he had a long while to make a new plan, and he could hope that they didn’t kill too many more of the gangs around so they could parley with them.

Well, they only killed in self defense, and the resistance movements’ gangs seemed pretty willing to talk instead of fight, so that ship hadn’t sailed just yet.

He hoped.

He stretched to pluck a couple of apples off a tree they passed. There was nothing long term he could work on now, so he should just put it all out of his mind.

He said, “Against Amity or Dyad?”

Lucia scoffed back, refusing to play along with his quiz like she always did. “I’m sure you’ll decide soon.”

He huffed, and juggled the apples for a second, thinking. “It depends on too many things.” It wasn’t a complaint just yet, more a dismissal.

“And there’s no certainty the gangs will listen to you, even if they do want to talk.”

She was right, as per usual. “What would you do?” Not a quiz, this time. He handed her one of the apples, wondering if he looked like the snake.

She bit both. “Refresh and recuperate. Practice and plan,” she said through a mouthful of apple, looking as innocent as Eve (but he was no Adam, and he didn’t think that sort of innocence existed anymore anyway), then swallowed. “And then go back east and put the parts into place to set things in motion. Maybe Dyad will seek to topple Amity, and we wait until there’s a clear winner to fight whoever’s left. Or they decide not to come south, despite the rich pickings down here, and we have to fight just Amity. But we wait either way. We bide our time, sit in the shadows for a while. Join up with a radio station on the ECN - because you know that for all of Cali and Arizona’s restlessness true change will happen out east and the ECN is the best way to stay on top of it - or make our own. We make sure we always have an answer, and make sure we’re prepared for whatever happens. Become indispensable to enough but hidden to most, and make sure we seem friendly enough that dependency doesn’t cause hate from those that need us.” She took another bite, and he briefly wondered who was truly the serpent.

“You’d play the long game.” He considered her plan.

It seemed sound enough, though a longer game than his. 

“You want to.”

He grinned. “Let the surprise happen to other people.” Then his face slacked, his smile dropping. “I don’t know if we can appear like friendlies as much as we’d wish. Not after the mess we made in Brooklyn.”

Lucia hummed in agreement. They really had fucked up there, shooting for the moon and notoriety before they were truly ready and having to disappear and later flee too suddenly to take much with them when it had come shooting back in their faces. “We can try. Sucks that people know we’re here, but I guess we just gotta lay low and pretend innocence whilst we’re here.”

“Said like someone who wants to stay here.”

Lucia stopped and turned to him, frowning. “I thought you wanted to stay here for a while?”

“I didn’t think it would be like this. I thought it would be more uneasy, less open warfare. And I didn’t think you or the others would want to stay after how dangerous it turned out to be.”

“It’s not much more dangerous than other places.” Lucia tipped her head back and took a deep breath. “It’s nice here. We have peace here, apart from the occasional fight, and there’s none of the fumes from the QZs.”

“It’s safe.” His voice was soft, the acceptance of Seattle creeping in. It was still dangerous, but they had made a place for themselves, made safety when they couldn’t find it, and that mattered more.

Sometimes surviving was the best you could do, the most rebellion you could manage. He just had to accept that that was okay.

They all did.

“It’s not something I would have originally believed, but we’ve got a whole district to ourselves, and enough of us to man the gates and walls. We’ve found and blocked up most of the entrances people get into our camp from, and we’ve trapped and defended as much as we can.” Lucia was more pragmatic, but she probably had to be.

Someone did.

They came across another Infected, hanging from the trap by its ankle. A Runner. Lucia did the honours of killing it and cutting it down, and he checked its pockets for anything remotely useful.

“The others all fell back to their original bases because of their aggression towards each other. And they left this district alone because of that. We came with the advantage of not being known, and we’ve set ourselves up here pretty well. We’re on a roll here.” He grunted and stood, empty handed.

“Maybe we can recharge and plan in peace. Plan properly, I mean. Before we go back.” She sounded wistful.

He didn’t know much about her life before she joined his group. ‘Part of the Brooklyn Underground’ was all she’d said, and he knew enough about the QZ Undergrounds to have an idea of just how not peaceful and safe her life was before joining with him and his group. However dangerous their journey to Seattle had been and however dangerous Seattle might be, it would always beat the Undergrounds, and Lucia was always glad she’d got out before they had got even more dangerous.

Whatever. He emptied another Molotov and flicked his lighter.

They burnt the Runner, the pyre a huge torch in the rainy dusk, and headed towards their final stop on their route to mark the number of Infected they’d found, what they’d collected from the Infected, and if they'd seen any outsiders. After give the skyline a long stare and lighting up a final cigarette, they headed back to base, where food they hoped wasn’t prepared by Pig awaited.

It was, thankfully, Jules and Andy who had taken over the kitchen area for the afternoon. Three huge loaves of fresh bread awaited, each one with different herbs baked in, and a huge cooking pot of shellfish soup, thick with a stock of cream and tomato sauce, heavy with the scents of ginger and lemongrass, with corn and whatever root vegetables had been harvestable was gently steaming on the cooker. A hot jug of tea - a bitch to barter in a world where coffee was barely a distant memory but well worth it - was waiting for them, too. Once Sascha had showered and sat at the makeshift table, Jules slid a tray laden with bread and soup across the table to him. He’d added cilantro to the bowl, and a soft boiled egg cut in half, and Sascha near wanted to kiss him for it. Soft boiled eggs were the tits, but sadly his culinary skills were severely lacking in the egg department, and after enough accidents he was no longer allowed to cook them. He devoured the halves, and two more appeared, these less cooked. He grinned at Jules, mumbling thanks through soft egg yolk, and proceeded to remove the yolks from the whites, spreading them over a slice of bread.

Beside him, Lucia was digging into the bread before her with animal relish, wet hair still plastered to her forehead. Three slices disappeared down her gullet before she started dipping it in the soup, and then she was spooning up the soup, head crooked low to the table, bowl tilted until she was more scooping it into her mouth than spooning it. He chuckled, and she turned to give him a half-assed scowl, still hunched over her food.

He took a tentative spoonful of the steaming soup, but then quickly found himself devouring it like she did. The bread, fragrant and warm loveliness in its own right that he’d write a fucking ode to if he had the time and energy, was near forgotten in the face of soup.

What came out of his mouth when Jules asked for the verdict on it was, “that’s some good fuckin’ soup.”

Jules laughed, cheeks reddening, and he rubbed the back of his neck. “We try. Nah, it was a good idea of Tim’s to set up the trap-nets. We’ve got enough shellfish to last us months now, and whoever was here before us had quite the vegetable garden. En’s spent so much time reorganising it, and its fucking payed off. It’ll never get super cold here, and all the rain is pretty good. Bet we could fucking grow rice if we wanted to.” It was only half a joke. Their little cranberry paddy proved the truth of that well enough.

“Don’t be fuckin’ bashful,” Lucia chided with a grin, reaching for some more bread. “You could have the best ingredients in the world, and it wouldn’t mean anything if you were a shitty cook.”

“Yeah. Look at Pig,” Sascha said, trying to maintain a straight face and slide the butter over to Lucia. She scrambled for it before it could fly off the table. 

“What about me,” Pig said, walking in with a yawn that set them all off. He was permanently on one of the night patrols, and so spent most of the days snoring away under the reception desk, where he’d piled blankets and pillows into a nest, only ever surfacing for food and pens to graffiti stuff on the sides.

“Talking about your wonderful kitchen skills.” Jules quirked his mouth into a smirk. 

“Fuck off.” He flipped them off with a grin, then yawned again, and sniffed the air. “Is that soup I smell?”

“Yep. Shellfish and tomato.” Andy portioned out a bowl for him. No eggs or whelks, but more shrimp. Just as he liked. Pig helped himself to bread and tea, settling on the stool on the other side of Lucia.

“Should keep you two on kitchen duty,” he said through a mouthful of bread, “you’re the best cooks among us.”

Lucia tutted, shaking her head with a small smile. “Then you'd have to patrol on your own to fill the gap, and how would we keep you in check then?”

Pig clutched his chest with a dramatic gasp. “You got no sense of fun.” He swallowed bread and made a start on his soup. “Absolutely none. Look,” he pointed with his spoon at each of them, “it’s not my fault if they spot me, and walk into my traps.” He widened his eyes like he was totally innocent. Sascha snorted, because Pig was many things, and absolutely none of them were innocent.

“If they’re blown up we can't steal their shit, and it’s hard to prove innocence when you’re luring them into our district specifically to kill them. Also the explosives are way better for Infected than the gangs. Trap mines might be okay, but the nail bombs and Molotovs are a waste of time on the fucking cultists, and the Sun fucks try and pay us in kind.”

Pig pouted, unable to come up with a smart comeback, and sipped tea from a chipped mug. He swallowed and ate a shrimp sulkily, spearing it with his fork viciously enough to make soup splash onto the table. “Whatever. Anyway, I’m out with Ray tonight. Middle perimeter, so don’t get your panties all twisted. All that’s there is Infected, and they’re all in the basements now.”

“Let’s hope you don’t get overexcited and level the fucking buildings again,” Jules said darkly, smirking. Sascha coughed on his tea, remembering that incident, and Lucia snorted into the remains of her soup. Pig flushed and looked away.

“One time! That happened one time! Not my fault the building was so damn unstable in the first place,” he grumbled, and Lucia’s snorting dissolved into a fit of uncontrollable giggles that set them all off, her hand smacking the table. Pig scowled and spooned soup up petulantly, mumbling to himself about bastard friends and how it hadn’t been his fault.

They all eventually got their mirth under control.

“Let’s keep the explosives away from him,” Andy said, trying desperately to suppress a grin. “Who knows what would happen?”

They all cracked up again.

“Fuck you guys.” Pig huffed, and sat back with a wry smile, eating bread defeatedly.

Once everything had calmed down for a few minutes, the sound of three different stews and soups bubbling away and Pig slurping soup, Sascha yawned again, and poured himself a cup of tea.

The tea went down almost as quickly as the soup had done, scalding his throat despite the milk in it.

Then, because he was tired and he didn’t have any patrols or supply runs until the morning - 4 am, when the world was still dark, the sun still hidden below the horizon - Sascha decided he should probably go to bed now. Better to now, than to try to later and not manage to sleep due to hearing the kitchen chatter at midnight, and he’d learnt that the hard way enough times not to stay up too much.

Mumbling sleepy good nights, he made his way to his sleeping quarters, an old office above the kitchen with a mattress he’d wrestled down from one of the upper floors and laid on some old pallets, and curled up, wrapping his blanket around himself. His shoes were kicked off across the room, a problem for the morning. 

The kitchen was quieter now, the warmth from the cooker having gone through the floor to heat his mattress deliciously, and he fell asleep quickly.

Sascha dreamt of Brooklyn, of the bombs and destruction, and woke a few hours later, sweaty and disoriented for a few seconds before realising he was woken up by a noise from the kitchen, not an explosion outside.

He sat and twitched the curtain over his bed to see outside anyway. It wouldn’t do any harm.

It was still hours before his shift, the sky still pitch dark, and he couldn’t see much. He could hear Infected wandering around somewhere in the distance, and he opened his window to see if he could hear better, but he couldn’t discern what direction they were in. He shuddered and hoped Pig and Ray didn’t run into many on their patrol, and shut the window.

After going back to the kitchen to get a glass of water and have a strange conversation with Tim, sat at the table in a cloud of cigarette smoke, he went back to bed, the here-again-gone-again ranger’s rambling and nonsensical words rattling around in his head.

This time he didn’t dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m contemplating making the next chapter circle back to dope or if I should introduce another gang just yet. LMK?


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Virus stood in the doorway with a look on his face only describable as a cross between confused and worried. In his arms was a bundle wrapped in a dark blue blanket. Edsel’s stomach sank, an idea of what the bundle was taking root in his mind, though how the fuck Virus would get his hands on something like that on a fucking trading run in the remains of Quarry Heights was beyond him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> intro chapters now out of the way, time for some proper plot!

The one major benefit of cooking for no one but yourself, Edsel thought darkly, hunched over a hot pan like some kind of cave creature whilst failing to make decent flatbreads, was that no one else could complain about the shit quality of it. If they wanted to brave the leftovers, that was their fault.

None of them ever really ate together. Someone was always out on patrol, or on a supply run, or hunting, or otherwise engaged, and their stomachs all ran on different schedules anyway, so everyone cooked their own food, and whoever wanted the leftover scraps was welcome to them. It gave them all the sense of camaraderie out of their inability to correctly judge portion sizes. In any case, it suited them better than eating together in a mockery of a family when they were nothing but a gang of smugglers who barely knew what family meant anymore. Family was a word that Edsel was sure didn’t mean people like them, and pretending to be one hurt too much to find his own meaning in the word. Family meant he and Simon and their mom in the QZ, but all that had happened in the past decade made that memory ache so bad he wanted to scream, so he couldn’t use the word family.

He’d announced that one day. Not about his mom, but that family didn’t mean people like them, and a sea of agreement and relief had decided it. They would not eat together anymore, not pretend anymore, and that was that.

Also, and on a more practical note, if they ate together, they’d have to take turns with the cooking, and not one of them trusted their stomach with each other enough for that. Virus’s awful cooking had proved that, giving them cramps for hours and making them too ill to want to get up the next day enough times that even if he cooked too much, they wouldn’t touch the leftovers.

Racci, weirdly, was the best cook. God forbid he went near raw meat, but his soups and stews were otherworldly, and he was somehow good at making flatbreads for the sandwich wraps that appeared to make up a majority of his diet, and a good portion of their diets.

Edsel was trying hard to remember what Racci did to cook them, and his first effort proved somewhat edible, only slightly raw on top. Not the best he’d ever had, but not his worst effort either. The second looked to be better, and he didn’t dare waste the ingredients to make a third. Preston had left half a can of his stew - not as good as Racci’s but better than Virus’s - so he could have that bulk out his dinner if he needed more food, though he wasn’t hungry enough to seriously consider it.

And they had an abundance of water, and Simon’s experimental fruit juices from the harvested fruits in the woodlands around them, so his dinner didn’t look to be a complete disaster. Edsel poured himself a glass of apple juice and, after a moment’s decision, decided it tasted better with his food. Too much sugar in this batch, though Racci never minded the sweetness.

Dude never seemed to mind much, always too energetic to ever get pissed. Half the time it exhausted Edsel just to look at him.

Racci was the youngest and most optimistic of them all, and when looking at him didn’t exhaust Edsel, pain found a new way to hurt him.

This wasn’t a world meant for softness, and Racci wasn’t soft, but he was steady and cheerful in a way that made Edsel’s chest hurt, always valiantly believing in something better. A better world, where they didn’t have to live like this, and sometimes just better resources.

Edsel was jealous of his optimism.

But cynicism was easy for him, and well practiced. Hopefulness wasn’t.

“Are you eating out of the fuckin’ pan?”

Edsel jumped and turned round, pan in his hand nearly flying across the room.

Inside said pan was a nearly cooked flatbread, the filling of grated vegetables and shredded duck - a rarity they indulged in at every given opportunity, despite how infrequent that was - ready to be wrapped. His first attempt was half eaten in his other hand.

“Yeah?” It wasn’t meant to sound like a question, but Mosey looked to be on the verge of laughing at him, arms crossed, leaning against the doorframe. A brace of fowl and rabbits hung from his hip from where he’d been hunting, though no duck. There hadn’t been much recently; just a mother and her ducklings every few months, and they didn’t want to kill the duck when she had hatchlings to take care of. The duck Edsel was eating was a rare exception, one they all still felt brief guilt over, even though the mother was already dying and they’d done their best to rear the chicks until they were fully fledged. “I’m hungry, motherfucker.” He took a bite of his wrap as defiantly and defensively as he could, and another, and then felt stupid. Mosey wasn’t Scab, and this was his turf.

Their turf.

Whatever.

And Mosey was his friend.

“How bad is it?” Mosey stretched, popping his neck specifically to piss him off, though his words were a harsher jab. Edsel was a crap chef, nearly as bad as Virus, and everyone knew it.

Though he was actually pretty good with potatoes and shellfish. There weren’t many ways to fuck up potatoes, and he’d watched his mom cook shellfish enough before everything happened to not fuck that up, either.

He took another bite, scowling and flushed, cheeks hot. There wasn’t much left, only enough for one more bite, so he passed it to Mosey, deciding to prove it was nice with more than just words. He swallowed his mouthful so he didn’t spray food everywhere. “Pretty good, actually.”

Mosey’s verdict was less positive. “For you.” He still ate it, which Edsel counted as a win and turned to deal with his other wrap, folding it with the spatula in a way none of the rest of them had mastered yet.

Mosey didn’t leave the kitchen, instead choosing to lounge in a chair that was not at all intended for that purpose and would leave him bitching about a fucked spine later. Edsel could feel his gaze boring a hole in his back, and continued his folding self consciously, wondering what the fuck was up with him to want to stay.

Usually Mosey would wander in to scrounge food before leaving to obsessively clean his weapons or keep watch over the field or go hunting again, even when he’d just got back.

Anything to be alone. Mosey was a solitary creature though, and someone who took meaning in what he could accomplish in the day. Edsel had initially scorned him for it, but he never seemed to have trouble sleeping at night, so he must be doing something right. Edsel couldn’t fault that.

Fuck, he couldn’t even be jealous about it.

There wasn’t any more food for him, unless he finished off the stew, and Edsel was beginning to get nervous when it became clear he wasn’t going to get the stew just yet.

He probably just wanted to cook.

Probably.

Hopefully.

After Edsel spent way too long folding his wrap and having his brain short circuit whilst trying to come up with something clever to say, he decided to just bite. Either this would be a horrible conversation, or nothing at all, but there was only one way to find out.

“You good, dude?” He turned with the wrap, hoping against hope he seemed as casual and confused as he wanted to feel. Anything but unease.

They might have a ‘keep to yourself’ general unspoken rule, but he’d known Mosey for years. They’d grown up in the same shitty apartment block together, gone to school together, and Mosey knew him almost as well as Simon did. Whilst Edsel was usually grateful; when it meant they didn’t have to say words and could just bump shoulders and laugh awkwardly, when he was cornered it was different. There he had no chance to not say anything, and he’d found pretending boredom worked best. Admitting he wasn’t necessarily okay was something he’d always hated. Virus could wheedle a few words out of him, but that was because they both could pretend it was for harmony, not care.

It was different with Mosey.

And with Simon.

For both of them, it was care, and he couldn’t bear burdening that on them. Not when they’d never turn to him for their burdens.

Mosey grunted, looking like he wanted to say something, dark eyes narrowed under furrowed brows like he was thinking over his words.

If he was actually thinking over what to say, then what he wanted to say would probably make Edsel uncomfortable.

The thought of that was enough to make Edsel almost want to find the toilet.

When Mosey didn’t say anything, sighing like he’d given up, Edsel let himself relax.

“Good chat.” It came out more questioningly, but Mosey just flapped his hand at him like he wanted him to go. Edsel nodded and left the room.

Yeah, Mosey had probably just wanted to be alone whilst cooking, and thought that hovering was the best way to make Edsel leave.

Edsel scowled at that. What was worse, the fact that he’d thought that trying to give him anxiety shits would work, or the fact that it did?

It was half an hour later when he’d realised he’d left the stew leftovers behind, but he was too busy cleaning his weapons to want to get up, and he wasn’t really hungry anymore, so he just sharpened and polished his machete and tried to ignore the sound of Racci dicking about on the radio in the next room between relaying information about the black market alliances and the latest waves of Infected outside the New York QZs.

They were doing fine, apparently, and so was Albany, but the rest of the local QZs only had their walls protecting them from apparent hordes, and were on the verge of a breach. Amity were apparently considering abandoning the outer districts to the Infected in Brooklyn, retreating to their inner sanctum of a fortified high-rise hotel right in the middle of the QZ, and one outer district was already in open rebellion at just the rumour. Staten Island was doing fine, barricaded like nobody’s business and strengthened by the ocean, but the rest of the city didn’t appear to be faring quite as well.

It was all dire enough to be concerning, but there wasn’t anything he could do.

He zoned out and went back to his task.

The pile of gleaming metal next to him seemed to calm him, but mundane shit like cleaning and sharpening and polishing weapons always seemed to ground him pretty well. Repetitive tasks had always put him in a state of ease, where he was calm enough to think properly on other shit, away from distraction They were regimented in a way that made everything else seem easy to deal with, ordered and neat like they could transcribe it to anything else.

Once he’d sharpened and polished all his knives and checked the strings of his bow and crossbow and the fletching of his arrows, he started cleaning his guns.

He was in the middle of polishing his shotgun, pieces scattered across the desk in front of him in a pattern only decipherable to him, when the door opened.

This was new.

They all had their own way of showing they wanted to be left alone, and it was something they all respected. Racci cooked, Preston went up top to the cabin overlooking the fields on ‘guard duty’, Mosey hunted, and Edsel cleaned his weapons. Interruptions only occurred when there was something vital to know, but those instances were so few and far between, and the interruption had always been to other people.

He looked up, putting the cleaning rag down.

Virus stood in the doorway with a look on his face only describable as a cross between confused and worried. In his arms was a bundle wrapped in a dark blue blanket. Edsel’s stomach sank, an idea of what the bundle was taking root in his mind, though how the fuck Virus would get his hands on something like that on a fucking trading run in the remains of Quarry Heights was beyond him. Distant memories from back in the orphanage in the QZ began to resurface, and he pushed them back with all his might. They left only after leaving a sour taste in his mouth and sweat on his palms. He wiped his hands on his jeans and made sure to keep them below the desk so Virus couldn’t see them shaking.

It was probably nothing. 

“What is it?” He braced for the worst, good mood leaching away with every passing second. 

Virus still looked vaguely apprehensive in a manner that made him need the toilet again. “I got the shit from Zack. Don’t worry. But on the way back I took my usual route, past the place that hostile couple live.” Edsel nodded. He knew who Virus was on about. They lived in a house they’d fortified, and didn’t seem to want to talk with anyone, always hostile to Virus from within their house. He’d always idly wondered if Zack knew they were there, but hastily decided he didn’t want to know. Zack might be a good trading partner, but he was a slimy bastard who Virus had once joked would sell someone out of their child to sell that child to Amity in exchange for immunity. Or sell the parents out and use the child as bait for whatever harebrained or paranoid scene he had come up with. Given his bundle, it looked to be less of a joke now. “Their door was open, which is like, what the fuck? They’re paranoid motherfuckers, and Zack said a load of Infected had passed through three days ago. So I went in, and I could hear a couple of Infected upstairs. So I went up, and sure enough there were two Runners, scratching at the door of a room. I knifed them both, but then I realised they were the couple. So, they’re dead, so I thought I’d take their stuff. They don’t need it anymore, but we might.”

“Yeah, but something tells me that’s not their shit you’re holding.” He closed his eyes and inhaled and exhaled slowly, and tried to settle himself with whatever Virus had done.

He had been calm three minutes ago. Maybe he could find that calm again. He continued his steady breathing.

“I wondered what they were tryna get at, so I broke the door down.” Virus hesitantly tilted the bundle so Edsel could see. “She had a baby. A daughter.”

He tried not to look at it, and failed miserably, his stomach swooping at the peaceful, sleeping face. “And you brought it back here for what fucking reason?”

“I wouldn’t trust Zack with a child in any situation, and I wasn’t gonna let her die. Look,” he cut in, watching Edsel’s face become more and more unimpressed. “We can find someone to look after her properly, but we can look after her for now.”

“And how will we feed it? We barely have enough for ourselves?”

His hands were still shaking.

Pragmatics. Always pretend pragmatics. He couldn’t tell anyone, the truth was way back in his past, and he couldn’t revisit it, even to say the truth.

Pragmatics above instinct, even if the outcome was the same thing.

“Baby formula. There was a bottle of the stuff I fed to her, and some boxes. Enough to last a few months from the looks of things.” Then Virus’s face paled. “Shit.”

Edsel sighed and tried not to slam his own face into the table in frustration, deciding that wrapping himself up in said frustration was better than the past. “Don’t tell me you forgot the fucking baby formula?”

Virus shrank back, sheepish, shouldering the baby to himself defensively. “I got the nappies at least!”

It wasn’t helpful. “This thing can’t fucking feed itself. And you brought it back. How the fuck can we look after it?”

“What else was I supposed to do? Take her to Zack? He’d probably string her up as bait for the Infected, or sell her to the military school!” He sighed. “Maybe one of Chad’s lot could help us look for a home for her.” That wasn't a bad idea, but Edsel hated himself for even thinking of giving in, even if his stubbornness was selfish as all hell.

“I can’t believe the others agreed with you.” Virus’s sheepish look heightened with Edsel’s temper.

_There’s nothing you can do. If you do anything now, you’ll wake that creature, and woken babies scream._

“None of them were about when I got back. You’re the first person to know.”

Great.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

“Oh fuck it. Fine. Two weeks. Two weeks and we make it someone else’s problem. And first thing tomorrow you go back there and get the fucking baby food.”

Virus’s wide grin haunted Edsel for the next few hours. Once he’d cleaned all of his own weapons he made a start on Simon’s, and tried as hard as he could to stay calm and not think of the shitty QZ orphanage.

The others were way too okay with Virus bringing a fucking _baby_ back. Simon suggested that if the little thing got hungry tonight they could always feed it goats milk, not looking at him, and Virus himself took responsibility for changing the baby’s nappy that night, before he climbed up to the cabin for night duty.

And because god apparently hated him, Edsel wound up with the baby in his sleeping quarters that night. Simon had volunteered when he’d seen Edsel’s face, but he had had it worse, and Edsel was not quite that selfish, so he’d shot him down and tried to even out his breathing and pretend nothing was wrong, just grumbling to himself that why couldn’t Virus look after it when Racci gave him a querying look before his evening ‘cast.

It hadn’t truly placated Racci, Edsel would have to be stupid to not see that, but Racci wasn’t any of his concern. It was none of his fucking business, and Racci was smart enough to know when to leave shit well enough alone when it didn’t concern him, so it didn’t matter.

Preston had managed to make a little crib thing out of a broken pallet, so at least Edsel could be across the room from the baby. It had apparently fallen asleep on the way back to the sewer, and Edsel hadn’t seen it wake up yet, though Virus had changed its nappy and Racci had fed it some goat's milk, so it must have woken up at some point. It was still asleep when he went to bed. He hoped it stayed that way. In his opinion, there was nothing worse than a screaming baby. Infected he could deal with - he could kill them to remove the threat, but babies screaming brought about a different kind of fear within him.

Look, he reasoned with himself, it wasn’t like he _hated_ babies. Just that he’d been forced to listen to them scream - and everything that happened afterwards - too much to not want to hide or vomit every time a baby started crying in earshot, and they always seemed to scream more when he went near them.

Well, this one was asleep. It could quite easily stay that way, and he was probably making a mountain out of nothing.

It would be fine. Everything would be all fine. 

With that thought, he wrapped himself up in his blanket, thankful for it’s warmth in the cold bunker, rolled over, and fell asleep.

He was awoken in the middle of the night by the baby crying.

His first thought was a panicked _oh god, oh no, please stop. Otherwise she’ll come! Please stop, stop stop!_ , his heart thudding in his chest like horse’s hooves, dizzy and wanting to be sick, but then he remembered the events of the afternoon, and rolled over with a sigh, heartbeat slowly returning to normal, though the nausea refused to recede for a good couple of minutes.

 _You’re twenty six_ , he told himself sternly. _You’re twenty six, not fifteen, and you’re out of the QZ. Nurse Johnson is probably dead by now. It’s fine._

It helped his nausea recede somewhat, his panic slowly dissipating, though he was still shaking.

The baby was still crying.

Edsel rubbed his eyes groggily, and went through a mental list of reasons why it was crying, desperately trying to think of a reason that wouldn’t require him getting out of bed and going near the wailing.

It couldn't be hungry, because it had been fed, and it couldn’t have shit itself, because he was pretty sure he’d be able to smell it.

It paused crying at his sigh, then started wailing again.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Shut up,” he mumbled, still panicked and paranoid that the fucking nurse would materialise from his nightmares, and desperately tried to think of other reasons why it might be crying. Cold, because the bunker got fucking cold at night, but it had that blanket, surely?

He wasn’t sure, but there was only one way to tell. He groped around for the oil lamp, absolutely hating the way the cold air bit his warm arm, and felt the slightest bit of guilt. Then he stood up, relinquishing his blankets with irritation and more guilt, and crossed to the pallet crib.

The nausea it induced was somehow preferable to dealing with the cold. With sickening fear, he didn’t have to worry about being cold anymore.

He lifted the lamp and looked down into the crib.

Oh.

He vaguely remembered one of the others telling him that newborns shouldn’t have blankets in case they managed to suffocate themselves, so the baby was just lying in a legless, short-sleeved onesie.

Fuck. No wonder it was cold. He picked it up, alarmed at just exactly how fucking cold it was, and it quietened to a snuffle almost immediately, almost seeming like it was trying to burrow into his body warmth. Rocking it and cooing _hello, please shut the fuck up you screaming bastard and let me sleep_ quietly and cheerfully at it whilst half-assedly plotting how exactly to murder Virus for making this choice, Edsel carried the baby back to his bed, trying desperately to shove away all semblances of shame.

Thankfully, it didn’t pick up on his still-receding terror, and he sat on his bed, cradling it until he was certain it wouldn’t scream again, still feeling a little sick.

Once the task of settling it next to him so he didn’t accidentally squish it was over, he turned the lamp off and curled around the snuffling thing sourly. “I still don’t want you here,” he mumbled shakily, but it was already asleep again, and didn’t hear him.

He fell back asleep pretty quickly, all things considered. When he dreamed that night, it was of the other babies; of still skeletal forms under a huge sheet, of _they didn’t suffer_ written in three feet letters in front of the ghastly scene, of the stench of death, of notes in the barricaded room saying how Infected were banging on all the entrances and there was no way out for any of them, how they were sorry for what they were doing but they had no choice.

It wasn’t the orphanage, but he’d never been able to decide which had been worse.

When he woke in a guilty mess, he huddled the thankfully still-sleeping baby close and swore to himself to make a fucking effort. She snuffled again but didn’t wake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> look ik ive been inactive af here for a while have this as apology. my tumblr is mxmaelstrom if you wanna yell at me or hear me yell about my plot frenziedly


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